Secret Anniversaries

by Scott Spencer

  “Betty turned on the bedside lamp. Her smile was regretful, conspiratorial.

  “Joe told me you were feeling poorly, dear,” said Mrs. Zweig, as she made her way across the room. The spout of the teapot spewed steam; Mrs. Zweig’s heavy, creased face was perspiring. “And he also told me you had a visitor.” She smiled at Betty, and made a little bow of the head.

  “Oh, how very gracious of you, Mrs. Zweig,” said Caitlin, as much for Betty’s benefit as Hilda’s. She sensed that Betty was looking on the landlady with a certain contempt, and Caitlin wanted to make it clear that this woman was elegant, generous, despite the clumsy intrusion.

  “Oh, not at all, dear, not at all. After all, you are a guest in this house.”

  She placed the tray down on the beside table and heaved a sigh. She fanned her face with her right hand.

  Betty stood up, smoothed her dress.

  “Hello, dear,” said Hilda, extending her hand. “I’m Hilda Zweig.”

  “Hello,” said Betty. There was a small turn of amusement in the O. “I’m Betty Sinclair. I work with Caitlin.”

  “Oh, is it true that she’s going to lose her job?” She spoke to Betty as if they were both elders, each entrusted with Caitlin’s welfare.

  “Like so much of what one hears in this city, it is completely untrue,” said Betty. She winked at Caitlin.

  “Thank goodness,” said Hilda.

  “So you won’t have to evict her after all,” said Betty.

  “We would have waited for her to find another position,” said Hilda. “You know that, dear, don’t you?” she added, looking at Caitlin.

  “I really must be going,” said Betty.

  “Oh,” said Caitlin, not daring to say more. Yet what would she have said had they been alone? Stay? Stay with me?

  “Work,” said Betty, vaguely, but with finality. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Caitlin.”

  “I don’t know how to thank you,” said Caitlin. Mrs. Zweig had poured a cup of tea and handed it to Caitlin. She accepted it and noticed a plate of cookies on the tray. Scottish shortbread—she had stolen a few from the tin late last night.

  “It has nothing to do with thank you,” said Betty. She raised her hand to stop Mrs. Zweig, who was about to offer to show her out. “I can find my way out,” said Betty.

  She walked out of Caitlin’s attic room, down two flights of stairs. Joe was sitting in the living room, reading the late paper. The smell of a recently peeled orange was in the room. When he heard Betty’s footsteps he put the newspaper down and their eyes met. She was sure he had sent his sister up because he did not want her to be alone with Caitlin. And the way he smiled at her, nodded, and put the newspaper up again did nothing to lessen her suspicions, or her annoyance.

  Upstairs, Caitlin was listening to Mrs. Zweig, but really all that she could attend to was thoughts of Betty. She breathed deeply before the aura of Betty’s scent disappeared from the room. Her feelings were like the beginning of snow, the point at which you can still differentiate each snowflake but must do it quickly because soon it will be impossible, soon the air will be thick and white and the wind will be howling.

  And so Caitlin sipped her tea and nodded politely as Hilda Zweig talked about her health, her husband’s business, of a frightening letter they had received from relatives trying to get out of Austria. Caitlin did her best to pay attention but it was difficult: within her she felt the freedom and fright of a girl running through a corridor, throwing open doors that had never been opened. Caitlin thought of how Betty’s chin wrinkled as she dragged on her cigarette, how she darted the tip of her tongue into her coffee to make sure it was cool enough to drink. She thought of what Betty said while they watched the Washington Sinfoniette Society: “The orchestra looks like the inside of the body. With all the violin bows going up and down and up and down, it’s what it must look like when you’re having an orgasm.”

  “You’re still so pale, dear,” Mrs. Zweig was saying. “Why don’t you at least take a zipp of your tea?”

  Caitlin looked at her, blinked, and felt her own heart accelerate. I’m in love, she thought to herself. At long last. She brought the teacup to her lips. The tea steamed in her face but tasted barely warm. She drank and then reached for a shortbread cookie. It felt strange to be eating them in front of Mrs. Zweig. She took a large bite. I’m in love with Betty Sinclair.

  SEVEN

  AUGUST 26, 1940

  Betty Sinclair lived in a parlor-floor apartment on Dupont Circle. It was four large, high-ceilinged rooms, with wedding-cake plaster near the overhead lights. The furniture was gray, for the most part, and the walls were white. There was never the scent of cooking in those rooms; there was light, lily-of-the-valley cologne, and music.

  Tonight it was raining. Headlights from passing cars flashed over the bay windows, revealing constellations of raindrops. Every now and then, there was a long groan of thunder that rolled around the black dome of sky like a marble inside an empty can. Betty’s rooms were lit by wall sconces. They cast their light against the smooth plaster so that it looked as if bolts of pale linen were propped in every corner.

  Betty had asked Caitlin to her house for dinner, and after dinner she wanted Caitlin to help her prepare a speech Congressman Stowe was going to give to the German-American Friendship League next week.

  Caitlin had arrived just before the rain had begun. She wore a blue dress with a rounded cream-colored collar. Her hair was thick with the night’s humidity. She was a little tipsy, too. It was Mr. and Mrs. Zweig’s wedding anniversary and they had insisted she drink a glass of champagne with them before she left. Accustomed to Viennese ways, the Zweigs were dressed for an evening at the theater, Mr. Zweig in his black silk top hat, Hilda in a gold lamé gown. They had drunk Moët et Chandon out of heavy crystal champagne glasses. Mr. Zweig, who so rarely spoke, made a sentimental toast and Hilda’s eyes filled with tears. The glasses themselves had once belonged to her mother, and this memory of family, of Austria, inevitably brought back the passionate confusion she had felt ever since receiving her sister’s letter from Vienna, in which the terrors of the Nazi occupation were described with breathless Aesopian tact. “There will be no more crops harvested here, my dear sister. And all of the seeds have been destroyed.”

  “Well, who knows what that means,” said Betty. “Anyhow, these Zweigs seem to have a lot of wine on hand.”

  “I told you. Mr. Zweig owns a wine-import company.”

  “Oh yes, right. I knew he bought and sold something.”

  Caitlin flopped into an armchair and stretched her legs. Betty went into the kitchen and came back with a bottle of champagne and two glasses.

  “More champagne?” asked Caitlin with dismay.

  “If you don’t, you’ll get a hangover. When you drink champagne you in fact commit yourself to drinking it all night. It’s like plucking your eyebrows. Once you begin you have to keep it up for the rest of your life.”

  “I have to drink champagne for the rest of my life?”

  “Yes, with me,” said Betty. She smiled, wriggled the cork out, stepped back, as the effervescence overflowed.

  Caitlin accepted the glass and waited for Betty to fill her own.

  “If my friends could see me now,” Caitlin said.

  “Your best friend can,” said Betty, touching her glass against Caitlin’s.

  They drank. The champagne was not cold and the bubbles churned in Caitlin’s mouth.

  “And now for our dreary speech,” said Betty. “To be given by our dreary boss at a banquet for dreary old men with fur in their ears.”

  On the dining-room table there was a plate of cucumber sandwiches, a large Royal typewriter with clear glass casings for the typewriter ribbon, and a stack of coarse yellow paper. Betty picked up the sheets of paper, took another swallow of champagne, and cleared her throat.

  “OK, I’ll be Elias and you be the German-American Friendship League. OK?” She must have seen something hesitant in Caitlin’s expression
. “You’re sure you don’t mind doing this?”

  “Who are they, though? This Friendship League.”

  “Businessmen, professors, professional people, people from good families. Some of them have been to Germany as tourists, or have family, or went to school there, and they want to preserve our ties with the German people. I mean, you should know. Windsor County is full of German-Americans. These were the people who helped settle this country.”

  Caitlin drank from her champagne glass. Within her, there were images, from the magazines, the newsreels, visions of Hitler, with his mad-assistant’s mustache, his furious assistant’s voice, his billions of soldiers throwing up their arms in unison. “What about Hitler?” she asked.

  “Well, what about him?”

  “He seems so crazy.”

  “I’m not his psychiatrist, personally. And if he is crazy, that’s not our affair. I’ll bet FDR sounds just as crazy to the Germans as Hitler does to us.”

  Caitlin smiled. She felt reassured Betty had acknowledged that Hitler sounded crazy to her, too.

  Just then, Caitlin heard the piping song of a cuckoo clock, though it seemed distant, muted. And following the song was a tap tap tap.

  “What’s that?” Caitlin asked, but as soon as the words were out she noticed an ornate wooden wall clock in the corner of the parlor.

  “That, my friend, is a cuckoo clock,” said Betty, with a small laugh. She was pouring more champagne into Caitlin’s glass.

  “But the bird can’t get out.”

  “Correct. I nailed the door shut. I can’t stand it when the bird just pops out.”

  Caitlin looked at her with amazement. “You nailed it shut?” It would have been hard to say why, but knowing this made her love Betty more than ever. Betty’s eccentricities made her seem accessible and forgiving to Caitlin.

  “I was going to give it away,” Betty said, “but it was a present from Stowe. Apparently worth a king’s ransom. And I do like it, but the bird is so obnoxious, with a loud voice and one red eye. It was made by the master clockmaker of Düsseldorf and the German trade minister gave it to Elias.”

  At last, the mechanical bird gave up trying to escape; its frantic calls and tapping were replaced by the steady, deeply authoritative tick of the clock.

  “OK, now,” Betty said, “I’ll just run through it, you listen, and then tell me where the speech is most boring and I’ll take those parts out. Elias is guest of honor, so he’ll be speaking last. That means they’ll have listened to five or six speeches already, so my figuring is he’ll be a hero if he keeps it short. What do you think?”

  “Me?” asked Caitlin.

  Betty pretended to look around the room, as if there might be someone else there to whom she had asked the question.

  “I don’t know,” said Caitlin, laughing. “It’s not as if I go to banquets.”

  “Ah yes, the poor country girl,” said Betty. “OK, ready?” Betty cleared her throat and began to pace as she read. “ ‘Thank you, Mr. Viereck. Ladies and gentlemen. It is a distinct pleasure to follow Mr. William Griffin, the New York Enquirer’s distinguished publisher.’ ” Betty quickly scanned the page. “And so forth and so on. This is all pretty standard.”

  “ ‘There’s been a lot of talk about nationalism here tonight,’ ” Betty went on, lowering her voice so it approximated the tone of a man. “ ‘And as I sat here, I began to wonder just what we mean by this word nationalism.’ ”

  “Don’t read it in that voice, Betty, come on,” said Caitlin.

  Betty shrugged, as if to say, Why not?

  “It makes me laugh,” said Caitlin.

  With mock admonishment and a shake of her finger, Betty said, “You see what happens when you let those Jews get you drunk?”

  It was just a joke. But Caitlin felt as if she’d been slapped in the face. She recoiled a little, cast down her eyes.

  “ ‘Nationalism,’ ” Betty read on, her voice returned to its natural alto, yet with a tremor within it now, as if she knew she shouldn’t have made that crack about Jews. “ ‘What is nationalism but another word for Americanism? After all, our great country was born because brave men wanted to live their lives free of foreign, European entanglements. That was an honorable sentiment then and it is an honorable sentiment today.’ ” Betty looked up at Caitlin, who nodded at her. Betty smiled and returned to the text.

  “ ‘There are elements in this country who insist that our independence, our nationalism, if you will, is something we should throw like a piece of tinder on the fires that rage in Europe today. There are those, and I think you know who they are, who say that good American blood must be shed on the distant battlefields of Europe. There are those, and I think you know who they are, who seek day and night to poison the sacred wellsprings of German-American friendship.’ ”

  Betty looked up from the script and shrugged at Caitlin. “Elias loves rhetoric. Do you think I’m banging this ‘and you know who they are’ drum too vigorously?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not even sure of … of who they are.”

  Betty sighed. “Well, in truth, it’s a lot of people—the Reds, until this nonaggression pact between Germany and Stalin, but soon that’ll be over and the Reds will be clamoring for war again. And the European-culture crowd, who are up all night worrying a few paintings might get torn, and all the liberal sentimentalists, and a hell of a lot of international financiers, as well, though responsible people in the business community are perfectly happy to live in peace with the new Germany. And, of course, the Jews. They’re very anxious to get us into the war, and people here are justifiably annoyed with them.”

  “So many people seem to have it in for the Jews, don’t they?” said Caitlin.

  “Well, I guess it’s not very nice to say, but they bring it on themselves.” Betty sat on the arm of Caitlin’s chair and playfully fanned Caitlin’s face with the pages of Stowe’s speech.

  “It’s a whole attitude. They stand apart. You know, back home in Michigan Henry Ford is a great hero. I mean, you know, half the people in the state work for him, or do something that comes out of the automobile industry. And Henry Ford likes to give out copies of a book. Have you ever heard of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion?”

  “I saw it in the office,” Caitlin said. “I didn’t really read it, something about rabbis in a cemetery, all plotting to take over the world.”

  “Well, I don’t think it’s necessarily real. It’s a legend, a parable, I suppose. But people believe it, and I think that’s interesting.” She stopped herself, let her shoulders down in a show of self-mockery, rolled her eyes, as if to say, Listen to me going on this way. Then she simply tossed the pages of Stowe’s speech into the air. They fell to the carpet.

  “Let’s just drink our champagne and listen to some music. I bought a Bessie Smith record today, it’s about ten years old, very rare. Been looking everywhere for it. You like Bessie Smith, don’t you?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Caitlin. She held her glass out while Betty poured.

  “I played you one of her records last week. The colored blues singer?”

  “I’ve heard so many new things.”

  “Remember ‘Empty Bed Blues’? ‘Woke up this morning with an awful aching head’?” Betty was half-singing the lyrics, using that slightly discouraged yet boundlessly hopeful voice of someone who longs to be musical but who is nevertheless tone deaf. She wagged her head back and forth, metronomed with her open hand. “ ‘Woke up this morning with an awful aching head. My new man had left me just a room with an empty bed.’I love that—‘new man.’As if this had happened many, many times before.”

  “I think I do remember it,” said Caitlin. She was enormously relieved that they had moved on from Stowe’s speech, the war, the Jews.

  Betty was at the Victrola now. She switched it on; the speaker breathed and crackled. Outside, the rain was starting to come down straight and hard, the way rain falls in the South, and the sound of the needle on the outer edge of
the record made the same sound as the rain.

  The record began with a delicate, syncopated introduction played by a violin and a piano. Betty turned toward Caitlin and swayed her body in time with the music, and when Bessie Smith’s unrepentant alto emerged, Betty opened her mouth and pretended the voice was hers.

  Tell me what’s wrong with me.

  My man we can’t agree.

  Now he tried to steal away.

  That is why you hear me say

  That I’ve got the blues,

  Yes, I’ve got the blues

  Gonna sing them night and day.

  Ticket agent, ease your window down.

  The violin filled in while Bessie Smith waited for the count of four. Betty bowed an imaginary violin, in perfect time.

  Ticket agent, ease your window down.

  This time, the piano filled in and Betty stretched out her long graceful fingers and played keys made of air.

  Oh, my man’s done quit me and tried to leave this town.

  The record player spun around at approximately seventy-eight revolutions per minute, the steel stylus on the Victrola’s brass tone arm rode the grooves of the record, and Bessie Smith’s voice filled the apartment. When the song was over, Betty played it again, and when it was done a second time she played it a third. And when that was over she found her copy of “Empty Bed Blues,” and she played it so many times that before the night was out even Caitlin knew it by heart. She liked the verse that went, “Oh, he’s got that sweet something and I told my gal friend Lou,” because somehow their three voices, Bessie Smith’s, Betty’s, and Caitlin’s, braided in an eerily perfect harmony on the word Lou, and when they sang it twice and then sang the last line, the capper, the line that held both the joke and the rhyme—“By the way she’s raving she must have gone and tried it, too”—they had their arms around each other’s waist and they were shaking their hips and jerking their knees in one of those approximations of Negro dancing only possible among people who have never known a black person.