The Golden Hour

by Beatriz Williams

  He crushes out the cigarette in the grass. “Whose, then?”

  “Charlotte.”

  “Who the devil’s Charlotte?”

  “Nurse. Johann’s nurse. It turned out they were sleeping together, she and Gerhard, before he got sick. By the time he recovered, she was three or four months gone with child. Instead of turning her out, I let her stay. I thought . . . at the time, I thought it was the ideal solution.”

  “The ideal solution to what?”

  “Because he wanted more children, desperately, and I didn’t want to sleep with him. How could I, after you? I felt no attraction to him at all. Revulsion, almost. And there she was, thoroughly infatuated, already pregnant by him.”

  Still, Wilfred betrays no astonishment. The same mild curiosity. He must be turning the whole affair over in his mind, examining it from all angles, making the necessary connections. Three children! One an infant! He straightens and pulls the cigarette case from his pocket. Repeats the ritual of opening the lid, selecting a cigarette, lighting it from one of the matches in the case. Smokes for some time before he says simply, “Were you mad?”

  “No more mad than you were, when you sought that lieutenant’s commission.”

  “I see. I see. And how long before you regretted arranging this neat little—little—compact?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t remember. It’s all blurred together now. It just seemed so perfectly logical, at the time. When she told me she was expecting Gerhard’s child, just exactly when he’d recovered enough to—when he expected me to—when I should have slipped back into my old life. And I knew I must, I knew it was my duty to return to his bed and have children with him, that was the bargain I made with God when he was almost dead with typhoid. Just make him well, and I’ll be a good, true wife again. But the heart, you know, the heart’s not logical like that.”

  “No,” he says softly. “It’s not.”

  “I was in a panic. I knew I couldn’t bear it, I couldn’t bear him as a lover, but what else was there? And then—almost by magic—this door opened before me. And I felt such relief. I felt as if I’d been offered a reprieve from prison. Do you understand what I mean? Do you—do you think I’m dreadful?”

  During the course of these few sentences, Wilfred’s risen from the grass and paced a few yards away to stare at the gentle slope of the garden, which ends in a tangle of prickly, marshy wilderness. At her question—Do you think I’m dreadful?—he shakes his head, speechless.

  Elfriede rises to her knees. It’s easier to speak to the back of his head, and the words, the terrible confession tumbles forth. “So I called in Gerhard and we had this chat, the three of us. I told my husband he must take responsibility for this child, it was only right, the babe was innocent. I said I would raise the child in our nursery with Johann, just as if it were ours. Of course they were both amazed. A wife isn’t supposed to be so understanding, you know. She’s supposed to dismiss the other woman and pretend the whole thing doesn’t exist. Instead I made my little announcement and left them together in the room.”

  Wilfred looks back at her, over his shoulder. “Alone, you mean?”

  “Yes, alone. Except at first he couldn’t accept the hint. He’s very rigid, you know, or rather he’s moral, he craves order and nice, clean lines of virtue and sin. Probably he was horrified at himself, at the mess he’d made, at the lust he felt for this woman. She left only a short time later, looking more upset, I think, than before. So I made myself more clear. One night I told him he should go up to Charlotte, to see how she was getting along. He said no, but I insisted. I said it was his responsibility to care for her, this woman who cared so much for him, who was bearing his child. At last he went. He came back down two hours later—I waited up, you see, to make sure—and then I knew it was done.”

  “Good God.”

  “Of course, he’s very methodical, Gerhard. So he went up to her on Tuesdays and Fridays, like clockwork, whenever he was home. At first he just stayed an hour or two. You know, to satisfy a physical urge, that was all, like an itch that needed scratching. The rest of the time he spent in the ordinary way, with me and Johann or else his own pursuits, and generally ignored Charlotte because, of course, she was only a servant. Then the baby was born. We were all so happy with her, so delighted. Gerhard was enamored. He had always wanted a daughter, you know. He would hold her for hours, he would stay in the nursery and watch Charlotte feed her, he began to talk about having more children. So I suppose I wasn’t surprised when he went up to visit Charlotte’s room again, one night, when Ursula was a couple of months old—”

  “My God,” said Wilfred.

  “Only it was different from before. He stayed longer this time, and he went up again the next evening. He began to go up to her four or five times a week. By then she’d moved to a separate room on the upper floor, a private room, but next door to the nursery so she could hear the children if they needed her. Eventually he had a double bed put in. He would actually sleep there with her and return at dawn. Just as soon as Ursula was weaned, Charlotte became pregnant with Frederica, like that.” Elfriede snaps her fingers. “Then it was Gertrud.”

  “And you never put a stop to it?”

  “That’s the trouble. You can’t. What do you say to them, it was all right yesterday but today it’s not? I’ve changed my mind? Anyway, there were the children. I couldn’t help loving them. Here were these beautiful babies, and there was no misery, no blackness, no madness. They call me Mutti, because Johann did and he was their brother. How could I give them up? So I let it go on. I told myself that she loved him and I didn’t, she could please him that way and I couldn’t. She might as well have his nights. I had his days, after all. He was always attentive to me, always affectionate.”

  Wilfred throws himself back on the ground beside her and stares at the sky. “Like brother and sister.”

  “Yes.”

  “Always?”

  “Yes.”

  Wilfred turns his head toward her, while the cigarette hangs from the corner of his mouth. He stares at her intently, without embarrassment. “Oh, my dear love.”

  “There was this time, about a year after Frederica was born. I went into the study, Gerhard’s study, on some household matter. I forgot to knock. I mean, why should I knock? I’m his wife. Anyway, she was there, Charlotte was there, and they were . . . they sat together on a chair, you see, her dress was open in front, her hair was down, she was on top of him. They didn’t even notice I was there. I stood there in the doorway and I could only think, It’s Wednesday afternoon, by God, a Wednesday afternoon. How dare they. Hadn’t they got enough the night before?” Elfriede cackles. “I realized in that moment how much he was in love with her, not with me. I was invisible to them.”

  “Elfriede—”

  “Oh, I know it was stupid. When there was no possibility of even seeing you again. When we are all just flesh and blood. And the months passed, the years passed, and it wasn’t as if I wanted you any less, or wanted Gerhard at all. But you weren’t there, you weren’t real, you were an idea, a memory, a heartbeat, a stack of letters, and Gerhard was real. And I loved him, not as a lover maybe, but still I cared for him, and I’d lost him. I would hear him coming back into his room at dawn, I would wake up and hear the bed creak as he got into it, pretending to have slept there all night, while I lay there burning, my God, just to be touched again, maybe not by him, but to be touched—”

  “Elfriede.” Wilfred lifts himself up and crashes down next to her. One long arm takes her by the shoulders and guides her home. His shirt, her Cloth of Tears.

  In the afternoon, Charlotte returns. Hangs up her hat on the hook in the hallway and gapes in amazement at the fellow in the parlor, before retiring to her room for a nap.

  Dinner’s a failure. It’s too hot and everyone’s out of sorts. Wilfred makes this valiant effort to keep conversation going, and his natural charm nearly succeeds. But the awkwardness of it all. The children, scrubbed and dressed and f
retful. Johann, whose natural interest in this brave British soldier turned into suspicion when he came running into the garden with his arithmetic lesson and found his mother and Mr. Thorpe lying together against the orange tree. Mama, why are you crying? he asked, and Elfriede, scrambling to her feet, wiping her hair and eyes, said desperately, wanting to soothe his fears, Because I’m happy, darling. Johann’s worried, confused eyes then rose to find Wilfred, who had released Elfriede by now. But it was too late. The light of worship had already faded from Johann’s eyes. Johann, who had looked upon his father as a hero among heroes, who had suffered so deeply and tearlessly as the peritonitis did its work, was not too young to realize what had transpired under the orange tree. Because I’m happy, darling. Stupid Elfriede. Didn’t she know that a little boy doesn’t want his mother to be happy in a strange man’s arms? The last possible thing.

  Elfriede tries to liven things up after dessert. She puts a record on the phonograph, some dance hall music, and Wilfred asks Charlotte to do a two-step around the living room. They’re both excellent dancers, and the room is large. Well, the whole house is large. Large and commodious. Elfriede’s a wealthy woman, after all, a baron’s widow, a baron’s mother. She’s rented the house for an entire year from some wealthy magnate from Chicago or Cleveland or Pittsburgh, she can’t remember now, one of those American cities that churn out millionaires like sausages. (Also like sausage, you didn’t necessarily want to know how the millions were made.) At any rate, it’s a handsome, well-proportioned house, containing a multitude of airy rooms that still manage to heat like ovens on a day 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 feeling. Are you devastated, dearest?”

  “It was an awful shock, of course. I suppose we thought that if he could beat the typhoid, he was invincible. I thought we would all grow old together.”

  Maybe he notices that her voice grows raspy on that last sentence. He says, in a kind voice, “But you didn’t really want that, did you? To grow old together?”

  “I don’t know. But that was what I expected. It was the future I imagined.” She pauses. “He was a good man. He should have lived longer.”

  “Should he? I suppose none of us is given to know how long we’re marked to live on this blessed earth. Well, God rest his soul.” Wilfred nods to the stairs. “Everything quiet upstairs? The children are well?”

  “Yes. Charlotte’s nursing the baby. She’ll put her to bed when she’s finished.”

  “And then collapse in a stupor?” he inquires dryly.

  “Something like that.”

  “Elfriede. You deserve more than this, you know.”

  The kindness in his face is too much. Elfriede’s shot through with nerves, with shock, with an anticipation she cannot describe, like fear and desire combusting together under her skin. He’s going to leave now, he’s going to return to his hotel. Or is he? In the corner of the drawing room, the phonograph scratches away uselessly. Elfriede starts forward and turns it off, and for a moment stands there with her hand on the edge of the table. She starts to shake her head—but really, what’s she denying?—and Wilfred, coming up behind her, puts his hand on her shoulder.

  “I thought we might take a stroll in the garden, before I return to the hotel.”

  It’s June, and the days are long. Twilight’s just settling across the sky, a hazy indigo, and the air is hot and rich with the scent of blossom. Wilfred sticks his hands in his pockets. They stand about a hundred yards from the house, just beyond the perimeter of light from the windows, where the grass starts a long, gentle slope toward the bottom of the garden. Beyond that, Elfriede doesn’t dare venture. There’s a pond somewhere in the middle of all that tangled vegetation, and she�
��s heard stories about snakes and alligators. She mentions this to Wilfred.

  “Haven’t you seen any?” he asks.

  “Not yet. But I don’t want to push my luck.”

  He pulls out his cigarette case and fiddles with it, as if unable to decide whether to smoke or not. “There were all sorts of predatory creatures in South Africa. I never realized how benign the English fauna really is until I went abroad.”

  “When do you have to go back?”

  “To South Africa? Never, I hope.” He turns to her and smiles. The moustache startles her anew. “My regiment was called home two years ago. But if you’re asking how long until I have to report back to duty . . .”

  “Well?”

  Wilfred turns back to the shadows. “Next month. Four and a half weeks, less ten days on the liner.” He opens the case and pulls out a cigarette. “I’m sorry about these. I was only an occasional smoker until I joined the army.”

  She watches him light the cigarette. She loves the way he closes his eyes as he draws in a long draft, the way he savors it. “You don’t have to stay at the hotel, you know. We’ve got three spare bedrooms.”

  “That would be decidedly improper, I imagine.”

  “There’s nobody to care.”

  For some time, he remains silent. Elfriede’s transfixed by the orange flare at the end of the cigarette, by the choreography of fingers and lips. “I’m afraid I’m not as strong as you are,” he says at last. “There have been other women since I saw you last.”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s the trouble with falling in love with a married woman.” He pauses. “Falling in love—my God, what a stupid phrase. When I think of what I felt upon learning that the good baron had recovered, against all probability, from an illness—I’m ashamed to admit—from an illness I expected and even hoped, yes, hoped would prove fatal. When I realized not only that I wasn’t going to have you after all but that I didn’t even deserve you to begin with. And then. Then. Then what I felt a year ago, when I first heard the shocking news, quite by chance, that Elfriede von Kleist was free at last.”