The Golden Hour

“Yes, a lung patient,” answers the doctor. “Pneumonia.”

“How awful.”

“He’ll be kept in the infirmary wing, of course. There is no danger of transmission.”

“I meant, how awful for him.”

Dr. Hermann nods and makes a note in his little book. He makes notes continually during these sessions—conversations, he calls them, as if purely social—and Elfriede feels sometimes like a laboratory experiment, an unknown specimen of plant or animal, something abnormal. “How do you feel about this?” he asks, still writing, and for a moment Elfriede isn’t sure what he means, the note taking or the new patient. When she hesitates, he prompts her.

“I don’t mind at all,” she says. “I hope he recovers quickly. Why should I mind?”

“Indeed. Why should you mind?”

“I don’t know. But you seem to think I should.”

“What makes you say that?”

Another thing about Dr. Hermann, he never answers a question except with another question. He wants Elfriede to do all the talking, Elfriede to reveal herself. It’s the very latest treatment for nervous disorders such as hers, and really, as compared to some of the others, it’s not bad. Dr. Hermann is a large, soft-edged, round-shouldered man who folds his long limbs into normal-size chairs without the smallest irritation that they weren’t designed to accommodate him. There’s something malleable about him. Even his brown hair has a pliant quality. In later years, Elfriede will realize she never noticed the color of his eyes, nor can she recall his face. Just the soft, even shape of his voice, asking her questions.

She makes her answer as clear as possible, so he can’t find another question in it. “When I said How awful, you told me there was no danger of infection. So you must have thought I was afraid of that.”

Dr. Hermann adjusts his spectacles on the bridge of his nose. “Have you ever felt afraid of sickness, Elfriede?”

“No.” She stands up. “I’m going to take a walk now.”

ADMISSION TO THE CLINIC IS voluntary, and Elfriede is free to come and go as she likes, no restriction on movement, no requirement to stay. She could leave at any time, in fact.

Practically speaking, of course, that’s nearly impossible. The clinic sits on the top of a mountain, surrounded by wilderness and reached by a single, steep road in poor repair. Until the middle of the last century, it was a monastery of the Franciscan order, and the last of the monks sold the grounds and the ancient buildings to Dr. Hermann for next to nothing, on the condition that the crumbling walls remain a sanctuary for healing and peace. Patients seek out its geographic isolation and clean, healthful air for a variety of reasons—lung trouble, nervous disorders, broken hearts, discreet pregnancies, discreet abortions—but the general point is to separate oneself from civilization. You can’t leave without mountaineering skills or help from the outside, and Elfriede has neither. Also, she has no money—none she can produce from a pocket, anyway. So, when she rises from her bench and leaves the courtyard, walks along the covered passage to the old chapel, passes the chapel, and exits the building altogether to emerge on the fragrant, sunlit hillside, she doesn’t imagine she could hail the driver of the Englishman’s carriage and convince him to carry her back along the twenty miles of steep, rutted roadway, or that she could simply walk them on her own. Where would she go, anyway? Who would want her?

She just goes outside to be alone. That’s all she wants. To be left alone.

AS YOU MIGHT IMAGINE, THE quarters in this former Franciscan monastery are austere, to say the least. Elfriede’s bedroom is literally a monk’s cell, or rather two of them knocked together, and contains a single bed with a horsehair mattress, a stool, a plain wardrobe in which she hangs her three dresses, a dresser, and a desk and chair. There are no bookshelves. Elfriede’s free to borrow from the library, one volume at a time, but she wasn’t allowed to bring any books from home, nor is she allowed to receive any while she’s here. She’s encouraged to write, however. Each week, a fresh supply of notebooks arrives on her desk. Herr Doktor Hermann wants her to record her thoughts, her memories, and especially her dreams, and to bring these notebooks to their daily conversations so he can review the contents. When her notebooks aren’t sufficiently full, he doesn’t express any obvious displeasure to Elfriede. Of course, that would be unprofessional! Still she feels his displeasure like a disturbance in the air, turning his flared nostrils all pink, so she writes her devoirs daily, sometimes for hours, in order to satisfy his hunger for her subconscious mind. She also keeps another notebook under the horsehair mattress. This is the notebook that contains her real thoughts.

In the evenings, or during the day when the weather’s inclement, Elfriede has another way of finding solitude. She makes her way to the music room, which nobody ever enters except her, and plays on the piano from sheet music obtained from the library. Sometimes she’ll go on for hours, in chronological order of course, Bach to Haydn to Mozart to Beethoven to Schubert to Chopin, one must be methodical about such things. Then it’s midnight, and as the notes fade a silence fills the chamber like a thousand ears listening, an audience of spirits, and Elfriede can almost—but not quite—feel that her husband and son are among them.

TWO WEEKS LATER, ELFRIEDE ENCOUNTERS the Englishman for the first time. An orderly pushes him in a wheeled chair along one of the paved paths in the infirmary garden, and she observes them both from the hillside above. She’s just returned from a long, solitary hike, and the mountain air fills her lungs and her limbs, and the sunlight burns her face in a primitive way. She sits among the wildflowers and wraps her arms around her legs. Below her, about the size and importance of squirrels, the orderly and the Englishman come to a stop at the top of the rectangular path, inside a patch of sun. The orderly adjusts the blanket on the Englishman’s lap and they exchange a few words, although the breeze carries their voices away from Elfriede’s ears. After a last pat to the blanket, the orderly consults a pocket watch and heads back to the infirmary building, leaving the Englishman in the sunshine.

For some time, he sits without moving. The chair’s positioned at such an angle that she can’t see his face properly, and anyway Elfriede’s a bit nearsighted, so he might be asleep or he might just be too weak to move. Still, he must be past the crisis, or they wouldn’t have left him outside like this, would they?

Judging from the proportion of man to chair, he seems to be on the tall side, if slender. Of course, Elfriede’s husband is a giant, two meters tall and almost as broad, so most men look slender in comparison. Also, this fellow’s been sick, and he’s wearing those loose blue infirmary pajamas. His hair’s been shaved, and the remaining stubble is ginger, which catches a little sun and glints. Elfriede creeps closer. The brief, vibrant season of alpine wildflowers has arrived, and the meadow’s packed with their reds and oranges and violets, their sticky sage scent, clinging to Elfriede’s dress as she slides through the grass. She just wants to see his face, that’s all. Wants to know what an Englishman looks like. In her entire sheltered life, living in the country, small villages, Berlin once to shop for her trousseau, Frankfurt and Zurich glimpsed through the window of a train, she’s never met one.

Closer and closer she creeps, and still his face evades her. They’re pointed the same direction, toward the sun, and Elfriede sees only his profile, his closed left eye. He must be asleep, recovering from his illness. His color’s good, pale but not ghostly, no sign of fever, a few freckles sprinkled across the bridge of his nose. His left hand, lying upon the gray wool blanket, is long-fingered and elegant; the right hand remains out of view.

Elfriede stretches out her leg to slide a few centimeters closer, and without opening his eyes, the Englishman speaks, clear and just loud enough. “You might as well come on over here and introduce yourself.”

“Oh! I didn’t—”

“Yes, you did.” Now he opens his eyes and turns his head to face her, squinting a little and smiling a broad, electric smile that will come, in the fullness of time, to dominate her imagination, her consciousness and her unconsciousness, her blood and bones and hair and breath. “My God,” he says, in a more subdued voice, almost inaudible over the distance between them, “you’re beautiful, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“What are you doing here? You don’t look sick.” He glances cheerfully at her midsection. “Not up the duff, are you?”

He says those words—up the duff—in English, and Elfriede doesn’t understand them, so she just shakes her head. “A nervous disorder,” she calls back.

“You don’t look nervous.” He smiles at her confusion. “Never mind. I was only joking. I’m the family jester, I can’t help it. My name’s Thorpe. Wilfred Thorpe. I’d offer my hand, but I’m supposed to be keeping my germs to myself, at the present time.”

“Herr Thorpe. I’m Frau von Kleist.”

“Frau, is it? You look awfully young to be married.”

She hesitates. “I’m twenty-two.”

“As old as that?”

“And I have a little boy as well,” Elfriede adds, for no reason at all.

“Do you? Well, I won’t ask any awkward questions.” He turns his head back to the sun and closes his eyes. “Fine day, isn’t it? Won’t you come sit by me? I’ll promise not to cough on you.”

“I don’t know if it’s allowed.”

“Bugger that.” (In English again.) “I’ll take the blame, I promise. I’ll say I had a coughing fit, and you came to my aid in your selfless way.”

She laughs rustily and rises to her feet. In the course of her creeping, she’s come to within ten or twelve meters of the low stone wall that marks the perimeter of the garden, and it seems so silly and artificial to be holding a conversation in this manner, calling back and forth across the gulf, that Elfriede goes willingly to the brick wall and perches atop it, a meter or so from Herr Thorpe’s left shoulder, crossing her legs at the ankle.

“That’s better,” he says. “Easier on my lungs, anyway. You smell like wildflowers.”

“I’ve been sitting on them. You speak German very well.”

“So do you.”

She laughs again—so out of practice at laughing, but she can’t seem to help herself. “But it’s my native tongue, and you—you’re an Englishman, aren’t you?”

“Indeed I am. I learned my German in school, from a fearsome and very fluent master. Used to beat me with a cane whenever I slipped accidentally into the informal address.”

“That’s terrible.”

“It’s supposed to build character.” He opens his eyes and squints into the sun. He looks nothing like her husband, not just because he’s smaller and his head is shaved and his bones stick out from his skin, not just because he’s in a wheelchair while her husband is as huge and hale and hearty as a woodsman. Herr Thorpe is terribly plain, wide-faced and thick-lipped, freckled and ginger-haired, and the electricity of his smile can’t disguise his current state of febrile emaciation. She holds her breath in disbelief at the sharpness of his protruding bones, at the length of his pale eyelashes. He’s positively lanky inside his blue pajamas, and then there’s this enormous pumpkin head stuck on top of him.

“I’m glad you’re feeling better,” she says. “Pneumonia can be so dangerous.”

“Oh, I’m all right.”

“You wouldn’t have come here if you weren’t quite sick.”

“I couldn’t have come here at all if I’d been really sick. It’s a damned long journey from Vienna, you know. No, I came through the crisis all right, but the doctors were worried about my lungs, so they sent me here for recuperation. And my parents agreed because—well.”

“Because why?”

“A personal matter.”

“Some girl?” Elfriede asks boldly.

“Yes,” he says. “Some girl, I’m afraid. But it all seems rather long ago now. What about you?”

“A personal matter.”

“Let me guess. Coerced to marry some doddering old bastard against your will, and you’ve gone mad to escape him?”

“Nothing like that,” she says.

“Crossed in love?”

“No.”

“Some terrible grief, perhaps?”

“Nothing too terrible.”

The man drums his fingers on the armrest of his chair. “Have you been here long?”

“Long enough.”

“Ah. Then perhaps you can satisfy my curiosity on a small matter. You see, late in the evenings, when I’m meant to be sleeping, I sometimes hear the most extraordinary music floating into my chamber. Piano. Goes on for hours. I can’t decide whether it’s coming from outside the window or down the corridor. At first I thought I was dreaming. Do you hear it at all?”

“I—well, I …” She stops herself on the brink of a lie. “I’m afraid it’s me.”

“You? Ah. Ah.”

“I’m terribly sorry. I didn’t realize anyone could hear me. I’ll stop—”

“No! No. Don’t stop on my account.”

“If I’m keeping you awake—”

“I don’t mind at all, I assure you. It’s enchanting. Last night, the Chopin … I had the strangest feeling …”

“What?”

“Nothing. Enchanted, that’s all. Absolutely enchanted. And it was you, all along? All the more enchanting, then.”

From another man, this compliment might have sounded unctuous. But Mr. Thorpe speaks the word enchanting with such easy intimacy, Elfriede laughs instead, and laughter feels so good in her chest, in her head. She looks down at her feet, crossed at the ankles, and only then does she realize she’s blushing. She asks hastily, “What were you doing in Vienna?”

“What does anybody do in Vienna? Art, culture, philosophy. Opera and cafés and whatever amusement comes one’s way. I suppose I was attempting what they used to call a grand tour, except I kept getting stuck in places.” He pauses. “Delaying the inevitable.”

“What’s so inevitable?”

“Returning home. My father’s found a place for me in chambers.”

“What does this mean, ‘chambers’?”

“Law. I’m meant to become a lawyer.”

“How—how—”

“Grown up,” he says. “Grown up and rather dull. Pretty soon I shall get 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 your suitcase across Bay Street to shelter from the sun, you found yourself bang under the awning of the Prince George. And since the Prince George, as a matter of tradition, offered the arriving tourist his first glass of rum punch gratis, why, you can see how the bar developed a loyal following. I should know, believe me, even though I’d arrived by air instead of by sea. That punch went down so well, I made straight for the reception desk and booked a room. Three weeks later, I had almost forgotten I’d lived anywhere else. Every evening at six sharp, I made my way downstairs and took up a stool three seats down from the left, and the bartender—we’ll call him Jack—whipped up a cocktail while I lit a cigarette from a case full of Parliaments, a brand relatively rare in New York City but nigh ubiquitous in this British Crown colony. So began my twentieth night in Nassau. Now pay attention.

Jack was the kind of bartender who sized you up first and decided for himself what kind of drink you needed. On this particular evening, with the place just loosely occupied and the afternoon sun still filling the windows, he took a bit of time and asked, “Be a double for you, Mrs. Randolph? Look like you been dropping bombs all over Germany today.”

“Nothing as exciting as that.” I rested my left hand on the thick, sleek varnish and stared at the gold band on my fourth finger. “Just a day with the ladies at the Red Cross.”

Jack made a low, slow whistle. “Since when?”

“Since this morning, when the nice fellow in charge of the magazine was so dear as to send me one of his telegrams to go with my breakfast.”

“The good kind of telegram?”

“See for yourself.” I set the cigarette in the ashtray, pulled the yellow envelope from my pocketbook, and removed the wisp of paper, which I spread out flat on the counter before me. How I hated the color yellow.

HAPPY ANNIVERSARY STOP TODAY NOW THREE WEEKS SINCE YOUR DEPARTURE NASSAU STOP TOTAL EXPENSES TO MAGAZINE $803.22 STOP TOTAL EXCLUSIVE WINDSOR SCOOPS ZERO STOP RETURN TO NEW YORK IMMEDIATELY REPEAT IMMEDIATELY STOP NOT ONE MORE PENNY EXPENSES WILL BE PAID BY THIS MAGAZINE=

=S. B. LIGHTFOOT

Jack peered over and whistled. Above our heads, a ceiling fan purred and purred, lifting the ends of my hair. Jack shook his head and returned to his bottles.

“So you see,” I continued, replacing telegram in envelope and envelope in pocketbook, “my time in Nassau may be winding to an end.”

“Don’t you like it here, Mrs. Randolph?”

“Very much. But I can’t stick around if the magazine’s cutting off my expenses.”

“You could write them a story, like this fellow suggests.”

I inclined my head to the pocketbook. “This fellow? You mean Lightfoot? That’s a nice way of putting it. Orders, is more like it.”

“So? Write the fellow a story.”

“It ain’t that easy, sonny,” I said. “There’s only one thing to write about in this town, this blazing, backward, godforsaken burg, and it turns out you can’t just waltz right into Government House and ask to see the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, s’il vous plaît, and make it snappy.”

“I guess not, at that.”

“No, sir. You’ve got to weave your way into society, it seems. For starters, you have to join the local Red Cross, of which said duchess is president, and make nice with the ladies.”

“That bad, was it?”

“It was awful.”

Jack set the drink in front of me. A martini, it turned out. “Compliments of an admirer.”

“A what?” I sputtered into the glass.

“An admirer, like I said. And that’s all I’m saying.” Jack zipped his lips.

I set down the glass and lifted the cigarette. Jack observed me with interest, thick eyebrows cocked. When I’d taken the first long drag, and another sip from the martini, I crossed my legs and began a survey of the room around me. As you might expect, there was plenty of room to survey, plenty of height and arch, plenty of solid rectangular pillars done in handsome raised wood paneling, plenty of large, masculine chairs and ashtrays on little tables. Not so many customers. Everybody still out enjoying the sunshine, no doubt, and aside from the elderly gent near the window, buried in his newspaper, and the two fellows in linen suits having an earnest discussion in an alcove, the joint was empty. I turned back to Jack.

“Not the old man with the newspaper, I hope?”

“He’s mighty rich, Mrs. Randolph. Beggars can’t be choosers.”

“Are you calling me a beggar, Jack?”

Jack’s face assumed an aspect of innocence. Above his head, the glasses glittered in their rows, highballs and lowballs, champagne coupes and brandy snifters, not a speck of dust, not a hair’s width out of order. “Just an old saying, Mrs. Randolph,” he said. “Something my mama used to tell me, that’s all.”

“I have my faults, I’m the first to admit. But I’ve never begged for a dime in my life, and I don’t intend to start now.” I tilted my head toward the window. “Certainly not with some old moneybags trying his luck in a hotel lounge.”