The Guest Book

by Sarah Blake

  Kitty raised her eyebrows. That was not the reason Elsa was here. Even she could see that.

  “Her father’s library?”

  “Oh yes, good lord, the Walser collection is one of the finest collections of illuminated manuscripts in Germany. I’d heard of it, of course, but never seen it. The Nazis are very canny to produce a show alongside the Summer Games. Puts to rest some of the stories about the brutishness.”

  “And wouldn’t the Germans want to show it off closer to home?”

  “Showing it is the way to keep it safe,” said Ogden.

  “And to share it with the world,” Mr. Lowell added generously. “Ah, there you are, Mrs. Hoffman—and Willy.”

  “Elsa,” Harry greeted her as she drew onto the veranda, leading Willy by the hand.

  The boy had had his bath and was wrapped in a blue cotton robe with matching calfskin slippers. The smoothed hair, the faint scent of soap his body carried, the glow from the heat and the scrubbing was so familiar, Kitty had to look away. Elsa sank into an empty chair, pulling him onto her lap and drawing all their attention, like the low flames of a fire.

  It was unorthodox. Unheard of. Children did not belong at the cocktail hour.

  “How uncomfortable,” Mrs. Lowell remarked.

  “Most comfortable spot on the porch, I’d say, Mother.” Harry put a drink in Elsa’s hand. She smiled up at him, taking the glass.

  “But surely he’d rather be in a bed upstairs,” Mrs. Lowell pressed forward generally. “It must be time.”

  “It is time,” Elsa agreed, turning her gaze to the older woman. “But he is too frightened.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Ever since his papa’s arrest,” Elsa said as she leaned back in the chair, “he cannot fall asleep on his own.”

  “My dear.”

  “See that.” Mr. Lowell shook his head. “I’d get the hell out of there if I were a Jew—”

  “A Jew, dear!”

  “You would not get the hell out, Father, and you know it. You’d stay and fight.”

  “I’d like to think so,” Mr. Lowell answered. “I’d like to think I’d do the right thing.”

  “What’s right”—Dunc spoke for the first time—“is to pressure Hull to open the quota for the Jews, right here.”

  “Damn right,” Harry agreed.

  “It won’t work.” Ogden shook his head. “Less than five percent of this country wants to raise the quotas.”

  “But these are refugees, not immigrants.”

  “These are Jews.”

  “Not all.”

  “Most,” said Ogden. “And ninety percent of the Communists in this country are Jews.”

  “But not ninety percent of Jews are Communist,” Harry retorted.

  Ogden shook his head. “I know that. You know that. But it doesn’t matter, don’t you see? It’s what people believe.”

  Willy had settled more deeply into his mother, sitting there beneath the language he couldn’t speak, his dark eyes following the voices as balls in a game, his head against his mother’s shoulder, his slippers hanging down, off his feet.

  “And why should these poor people face more unfriendliness?” Mrs. Lowell rang out.

  Incredulous, Harry turned. “Unfriendliness?”

  “Well, I know, dear, I’m just saying they should go where they are wanted. It’s not fair to anyone, the Jews least of all.”

  “I’m with Harry.” Dunc took a great swallow and set his glass down. “What I know is when business decides to do something—when something is good for business—it gets done. I’m just one of the poor slobs in government. You”—he fixed his attention on Ogden—“are not.”

  “No matter what business might want, or decide, that’s where we are in this country,” Ogden said evenly. “We are not hospitable. FDR knows this. He won’t push.”

  “Then you must push him,” said Elsa.

  The ice fell in Kitty’s glass, registering the quiet.

  “No one pushes Roosevelt.” Mr. Lowell lumbered to his feet. “That man marches to his own tune.”

  “And what do you think your president would need in order to change his tune?” Elsa asked, glancing at Ogden.

  “A sense of peril,” Dunc mused. “For the ordinary American.”

  “There is no need. This madness will settle in good time.” Mr. Lowell dropped ice into his glass and turned around. “There are too many good men in charge. Your father is one. I’ve always liked him.”

  “Hitler is toying with the world, Mr. Lowell.” Elsa shook her head. “With one hand he negotiates peace; with the other he sets us on the path toward war. We all see it. Right before us. He is a magician of the finest order.” Her voice caught. “And we do not look away. Instead, we draw closer; surely what we see cannot be believed. Surely our eyes deceive us.”

  “How can that be?” Dunc asked.

  “We want to be deceived. There is bread again. There are jobs.” Her voice softened as Willy reached his arms behind his head and brought Elsa’s cheek down to his. She let it rest there, her voice dropping as she finished. “That is his genius.”

  “Hitler’s genius,” Harry concluded, “is to have marched into the Rhineland, all the while proclaiming himself a man of peace.”

  “Though war was averted,” Ogden remarked.

  “Yes,” agreed Elsa, her eyes on him. “And now all steel factories in the Ruhr are in his hands.”

  Ogden held her gaze.

  “No one wants war,” he said after a moment.

  Elsa set her glass carefully down. “Then we are lost.”

  Abruptly, Ogden moved out of the circle toward the back of the porch, joining Mr. Lowell at the drinks cart.

  “I can’t understand why there isn’t some protest.” Mr. Lowell frowned.

  “There are many ways to protest,” Elsa answered, her eyes on Ogden, his back to them all.

  Ogden did not turn around, but it seemed to Kitty the cord between them tightened. What was she telling him?

  “I am not a dictator, the Fuhrer has proclaimed,” Elsa remarked. “I have only simplified democracy.”

  “Brilliant.” Dunc exhaled beside Kitty.

  “He is brilliant,” Elsa agreed. “And that is the trouble. Too many see only the thug. They do not see the genius. So it happens swiftly, without stopping. In a matter of months. Right under your noses.”

  “Good lord,” said Mrs. Lowell spiritedly. “You can’t be suggesting that could happen here.”

  “Forgive me, Mrs. Lowell.” Elsa turned to her with a small smile. “But it is a mistake to think news happens somewhere else. To others. The news is always about you. You must simply fit yourself in it. You must see how—you must be vigilant.”

  “Mrs. Hoffman, we have laws to protect the weak.” Mrs. Lowell was determined to do battle.

  “Protect.” Elsa stopped a minute, looking at the older woman. And when she spoke again, she was soft. “Who protects those Negroes pulled from jails and hanged in trees?”

  She might as well have thrown a bomb, Kitty thought. There was a shocked, sudden silence. It was a horrible image, unmentionable—and now here in front of them all.

  “But that’s different, that’s completely different,” Mr. Lowell protested.

  “Is it?” Harry asked.

  “Don’t be provoking,” Mrs. Lowell said with dignity. “You know that it is.”

  “Never mind that,” Mr. Lowell broke in. “Surely, Mrs. Hoffman, someone of your stature, your father’s stature, shouldn’t worry—”

  “No.” Elsa’s smile was sad. “My father does not worry. He believes in the good of people.”

  “And that is good, surely?” Mr. Lowell pressed.

  “These days, goodness is frightened, Mr. Lowell.”

  Ogden turned around at last, listening intently.

  “There is so much talking,” Elsa said. “So much talking. And no one acts.”

  Impatience flashed across Ogden’s face. And watching him, it oc
curred to Kitty for the first time that Ogden did not like Elsa. A dizzy relief coursed through her. It was too much. This woman was too much, holding her boy and talking of war. It was clear Ogden thought so as well.

  “And every day it grows more simple,” Elsa went on, quietly. “It has all become quite simple. Everywhere there are single, lonely acts of heroism or cowardice.”

  “There cannot be an in-between?” Kitty asked, shifting her gaze to Elsa. “Something in the middle?”

  “The middle?” Elsa turned her full attention on Kitty with barely disguised scorn.

  “You ought to leave, my dear. Why not leave?” Mr. Lowell leaned forward before Elsa could finish.

  “We cannot leave Germany to the Nazis.”

  Harry moved out of the shadows and leaned against the curve of the veranda’s arch.

  “Now is the time,” Elsa said. “At the height of the preparation for the Olympics—the anti-Juden signs are being pulled off the streets, erased from around the stadium—we must prove his falsehood, we must—”

  “We?” Restless and uneasy, Kitty set her vermouth on the wooden floor.

  Elsa looked at her, nodding. “You must act.”

  “Act.” Kitty pushed up out of her chair impatiently and moved out of the ring of chairs toward the low balcony of the veranda wall. The sun hovered, trembling, just above the flat water. This woman sitting there, the boy in her lap like an ember, a coal of such intensity and purpose, it threatened the talk, the porch, this hour meant to be only the hour before dinner.

  Willy’s slipper slid off his foot, and Elsa leaned and put it back on without looking, without a word. That boy should go up. The boy should be in bed. He was clearly so tired. And so little. Kitty forced herself to look away.

  “It is no secret that Hitler plans to arm the country,” Elsa continued. “But do you understand he’s been doing it for years now? Father’s factory has been making triggers for the howitzers.”

  She had everyone’s attention now.

  “And the stock?” Ogden folded his arms.

  “In Düsseldorf.”

  “The muzzle?”

  “Essen.”

  Something was being decided, Kitty felt it, right on the surface between them.

  “But how is that possible?” Dunc asked, incredulous.

  “Heydrich had a warning system,” said Elsa, looking at Ogden. “When the French inspectors are expected, we send hairpins and faucets down the line.”

  “Go on,” Ogden said.

  “It is worse.” She leaned forward toward him. “Last month the factory began forging small propellers that will move by the plane’s speed to make horrible sounds.”

  “And what is that?”

  She paused, searching for the words. “Every Stuka bomber flying over England will scream—”

  “England?” Priss broke in.

  “England,” Elsa maintained. “Then Russia.”

  “Is there proof?” Ogden asked.

  Very slowly, Elsa nodded at him.

  Ogden grimaced and looked off.

  “Hear that? I’d like to get my hands on proof like that,” vowed Harry. “That would get this war started, get this show on the road. That’s what’s right—”

  “What is right,” Kitty said as she launched forcefully from the edge of the veranda, “is to stop talking and look at the sky. Just look,” she insisted, catching the frown on Dunc’s face and wanting to close it up and pack it away quickly, stuff it like a handkerchief into his pocket. “Look where you are.”

  Past the veranda, at the edge of the lawn, a shock of gold swept across the darkened blue of the evening sea, reaching to the rocks at the edge of the lawn as the sun hovered before its final drop. The granite shimmered.

  She could feel Og’s eyes on her, and she turned and looked at him over her shoulder and gave him a brilliant smile. She didn’t understand the battle he seemed to be waging, but she would fight it—with him. Elsa was asking something of him that he couldn’t give, that he was at odds with himself to give. And Kitty would stand beside him. She had come back to him. She was here, now.

  He nodded at her, clearly moved.

  “Kitty’s right,” he said, drawing toward her from the shadows of the porch.

  “Kitty is not right,” Priss observed good-humoredly, standing up and stretching. “But Kitty has just done what she does best, pointed out the good, thank god, and the beautiful. Never mind the rest for now.”

  “Hear, hear,” said Dunc, raising his glass. “To the good and the beautiful,” he said, and finished his drink in a swallow, setting his glass on the low table and pulling Priss by the hand to go and sit facing the sunset on the broad steps of the veranda off to the side.

  No one spoke. The sun lowered slowly into the black below. In an instant it was gone. The sun vanished into the sea, but trailing such a hot curtain of color, it seemed the sky hung pink fire, hot and rich, baroque as a cathedral’s inner dome.

  And Kitty glanced back to see that Elsa had put her hand on Willy’s head and was speaking in a low murmur against his cheek.

  Slowly, the little boy’s arms loosened as he fell off to sleep in his mother’s lap. How she longed to have the weight of a child against her chest. How Kitty longed to hold him.

  “It’s time to crack the lobsters, Harry,” said Mrs. Lowell, rising from her chair and moving toward the dining room. “Cook is waving at me from the hallway.”

  Mr. Lowell began to gather glasses and set them upon the cart. Behind him the dining room sprang slowly into light as Mrs. Lowell made her way around the long, wide table, lighting candles. The maid came in with an enormous steaming bowl and set it on one end of the table. Another followed with cut-glass bowls filled with melted butter. Tomato aspic shivered in a jelly dish. The wooden ceiling arched above the table, a tongue-and-grooved dome, as if the room sat on the top deck of a schooner. A great mirror at the back only amplified the effect of space around the table.

  “Harry?” Mrs. Lowell called through the open doors.

  Harry pushed himself reluctantly off the veranda wall.

  “I’ll help,” Ogden offered, following him inside.

  Wordless, Elsa and Kitty remained where they were. Kitty could just make out the heavier shadows of Priss and Dunc leaning against each other at the darkened edge of the veranda.

  A heaping platter of steamed red lobsters was carried out by one of the maids and set on a side table, and Harry and Ogden put on the aprons another maid held, Harry turning at something Ogden said, with a smile of agreement. The two men were perfectly highlighted in the frame of the French doors. Harry donned the cooking mitts and began to rip the tails from the bodies. Ogden took up a hammer and started to crack the claws.

  “This place becomes Milton,” Elsa mused. “I didn’t see that until now.”

  Kitty sat down on the low veranda wall. The place did become Ogden, though she didn’t like Elsa’s easy familiarity.

  A man with a lantern crossed from the back of the house and down the dark lawn toward the hedge and through it. Kitty watched the small light flash between the trees as he descended the path to the dock. She was aware of Elsa watching as well, behind her. The light was carried all the way out onto what must have been the end of the dock. A spark and then the flare of a second light rose above the dark shimmer of water. Then the first light turned and walked back along the dock, leaving the second lantern burning at the end.

  “How quiet peace is,” Elsa said softly.

  The man reappeared at the end of the garden and passed along the pathway to the back of the house. The lantern at the end of the dock remained.

  The shadows on the porch darkened another notch as Elsa shifted the sleeping boy higher on her lap, so he was curled close against her chest.

  “Do you believe there is one story for each of us, one alone that we must follow?” Elsa asked.

  “Fate, you mean?” Kitty turned to her.

  “If you like.”

  “No,” Kitty
replied. “I do not. It is too cruel.”

  Elsa looked at her, and then, as if deciding something, sat back in her chair. “Good,” she whispered. “That is good.”

  Kitty glanced at her.

  “God, then?” Elsa went on. “Some great eye above who watches? Who watches over us all?”

  Kitty shook her head. “I cannot,” she admitted.

  Elsa looked up at her with sympathy. “Because of your child.”

  “My child?” Kitty stiffened.

  Elsa nodded. “There is no one watching. No protecting hand. No one watching. There is only us. We know that, don’t we?”

  No, Kitty thought mutinously. Not at all. And what did she mean, we? There was no we with this woman who had been pushing and pushing, needling Ogden to do something he didn’t want to—with her little boy in her arms.

  Elsa was still looking at her, considering her. “And yet, this whole evening, you haven’t taken your eyes off Milton or me. What is it you think you see?”

  “That you are dangerous,” Kitty answered, raising her head.

  It was not what she expected to say. It was not at all what Elsa, apparently, expected to hear, because a low, unhappy laugh of recognition burst from her. A laugh that nonetheless made Kitty feel ashamed.

  “Dangerous? I am not dangerous. I’m not … anything at all.”

  Kitty flushed in the dark.

  “Lobsters on.” Mrs. Lowell had come to the threshold of the veranda. “Come in, everyone.”

  Priss and Dunc unfolded and moved from the shadows where they’d been sitting toward the lighted doorway.

  “Coming in?” asked Priss.

  “In a minute,” Kitty answered, trying to compose herself, turning her back on Elsa.