The Golden Hour

by Beatriz Williams

  Anyway, there they sat together on the sofa, Elfriede and Lucy MacLeod, just last week. Mrs. MacLeod was having one of her bad days, which seem to come more frequently now than when the terrible news was still fresh. Grief is like that sometimes. She’d lost patience with having her hand held. She got up and checked the window—Margaret was playing outside with the MacLeod fry—and lit a cigarette. She stared at the photograph of her husband on the table, stiff and constipated in his dress uniform, and told Elfriede how she found some love notes among the personal effects sent home with Lieutenant MacLeod’s kit.

  “This must have been some comfort,” Elfriede said, in her careful English.

  Mrs. MacLeod laughed. “I guess it would have been, if they were mine.”

  Elfriede set her teacup in her saucer. “Yours?” she asked stupidly.

  “Of course I know how it is,” said Mrs. MacLeod. “We all know how it is, when they’re away. But it’s still a shock, all the same, to see another woman’s handwriting. Some woman in Paris, of course. They all do it.”

  Elfriede, too shocked to reply, watched the movements of Mrs. MacLeod’s arm as she smoked her cigarette, staring at her dead husband’s photograph. Over a decade now, and Elfriede still doesn’t understand these Englishwomen. True, the chariness is mutual. The regimental wives never did regard her as one of their own, did they? She’s too foreign, for one thing, too German, a fault now almost unforgiveable. For another thing, she’s shy, and shyness in a beautiful woman will always be seen as arrogance. So most of them dislike her and gossip about her endlessly at all the parties and luncheons to which she’s not invited. She knows this, naturally. Women have an instinct for knowing these things. But she tries her best to ignore the antipathy, to soldier on in the grand tradition of army wives, to drink their damnable tea and pretend an earnest interest in the weather and the cultivation of roses. And maybe these efforts are finally having some effect on her. As Mrs. MacLeod studied Lieutenant MacLeod’s faithless face in the photograph, Elfriede found herself glancing at the window in a fruitless search for some weather to discuss.

  “They all do it,” Mrs. MacLeod said again, almost to herself.

  “Not—not all, surely,” whispered Elfriede.

  Mrs. MacLeod turned. “Oh, you poor thing. Do you think your husband’s the exception?”

  “He—he would not—”

  “Wouldn’t he?” Another laugh. “Two years at a time in India, and you think he didn’t find some native women to suit his fancy, like all the others? Don’t you know?”

  “I really don’t think we should—”

  “My God, look at you, so happy. So untouched. Husband still alive, baby on the way. How nice. Major Thorpe’s pretty wife, who stayed at home when the regiment went to India, never mind her husband’s needs. Imagined he could last two years without it, apparently.”

  “It?” Elfriede said faintly.

  “It. You know, dearie. What goes on between husbands and wives. Between husbands and other women, when they haven’t got it at home, and very often when they have.”

  Well! So much for the weather and the roses. As Mrs. MacLeod spoke, the gray light from the window illuminated the smoke of her cigarette, and it rose from her hand like a ghost. How pink and swollen her face was, how slurry her words. She gripped the table behind her with strange ferocity. When Elfriede first arrived, she thought she’d interrupted Mrs. MacLeod in some paroxysm of grief, but later—remembering also the strong odor of eau de cologne filling the room—she wondered if she’d interrupted Mrs. MacLeod in some paroxysm of Scotch whiskey. It was only eleven o’clock in the morning, but still. That would explain everything. Her appearance, the sound of her voice, the spite of her words.

  “Now, Mrs. MacLeod,” Elfriede said, in her most conciliatory voice, “it’s so natural to make suspicion, from time to time, while our husbands are away—”

  “Suspicion! Oh, Lord. Suspicion, indeed. My dear, they all do it, whenever and wherever they can. My husband, your husband. It’s war, after all. Battle puts up their animal instincts, you know, and they’re all just animals at heart, aren’t they? Men.”

  Elfriede rose from the sofa. “Perhaps I should leave, Mrs. MacLeod. I will return when you feel better.”

  “Oh, God. Oh, God. You think you’re ever so much better than the rest of us. Is it because you’re so beautiful? Our precious little German princess, you think he won’t stray? Poor Mrs. Thorpe. They all do it.”

  “Mrs. MacLeod—”

  “I’ll tell you another thing. You ought to ask your husband about that woman he sees in Paris. Those twenty-four-hour passes of his, those important meetings. Everybody knew about it. My husband wrote me, before he died. It was the joke of the regiment. Major Thorpe’s woman in Paris. Everybody knew.”

  With that, she crushed out her cigarette, directly onto the wooden table, not far from her dead husband’s photograph, and turned away.

  So Lucy MacLeod has her own opinions on the state of Elfriede’s marriage, and the significance of leave.

  Now, Elfriede—a principal in this marriage, while Mrs. MacLeod is not—probably should have discarded these opinions as unworthy and ill-informed, as maybe even spiteful and conceived in a perfectly understandable state of bitterness. Grief will do that.

  But certain opinions, once presented, are so difficult to ignore. Do you think that when Elfriede went to pick up her husband from the train this afternoon, she didn’t search his face for some expression that would belie Mrs. MacLeod’s extraordinary claims? Do you think that when they retired to the privacy of their bedroom this evening, Elfriede wasn’t conscious of the hippopotamus grossness of her belly as her husband pulled her free from her dress and her petticoats?

  Do you think, as he arranged her carefully at the edge of the bed and plunged headlong into her body, Elfriede didn’t torture herself with the image of Wilfred plunging into some woman in Paris?

  Do you think she didn’t hold his sobbing shoulders afterward and wonder: Affection? Or remorse?

  Wilfred’s voice grows louder still. How big this voice has grown over the course of their marriage, how commanding, how gravelly. That’s what happens with age and cigarettes, Elfriede supposes. We all grow older, we grow from idealistic youth into an adulthood of compromise and necessity. In between these desperate utterances—Elfriede! Elfriede!—the robin makes his joyful call. Then, in a flutter of wings, he’s gone. Wilfred steps into the folly and sees her in the twilight. He slumps against a pillar and whispers, Thank God.

  “Go away,” she tells him.

  He just stares at her, not with any particular expression, unless his absence of emotion is an expression of its own. The old light flattens away the lines of his skin. He’s wearing a linen undershirt over his trousers. Braces over his shoulders. Barefoot, a thing Elfriede notices at the very edge of her vision.

  “I apologize,” he says. “I shouldn’t have said that. I forget you’re not accustomed to gallows humor.”

  Elfriede has to think for a moment before she remembers. Not if he kills me first. Oh, that. She casts about for some reply, and ends up shaking her head.

  “Do you think it doesn’t grieve me?” he says. “I’ve loved him like a son. I’ve raised him like a son. To imagine him inside enemy trenches—”

  “Raised him? You? I’ve raised him. I’ve raised them both, Wilfred. You were on the other side of the world.”

  “And he was in school, but we had our months and years, and we made what we could of them. The army’s my job, Elfriede, we both agreed I shouldn’t resign. Remember when the regiment got orders for India? I was the one who couldn’t bear the thought of leaving. You were the one who convinced me to go.”

  “Because I thought you’d regret it one day, if you resigned. I knew how you loved adventure. I knew you wouldn’t be happy in a bank or in chambers. I loved you too much to make you stay at home. And I trusted your love.”

  “You might have joined me out there at any time. At any
moment, I’d have—I’d have died of joy, to have you with me.”

  “Would you? Really? With so much variety at hand?”

  He gapes at her. His crossed arms fall apart. The robin, returning, begins to sing again, and Wilfred spins on his heel and walks back into the darkness.

  Elfriede releases her breath and hangs her head, slumping, gripping the bench beneath her with much the same ferocity as Mrs. MacLeod gripped the table on which her husband’s photograph stood. Oh, the photograph. Why hadn’t Mrs. MacLeod put it away, in the face of the evidence? Why hadn’t she smashed it, destroyed it, scissored out those faithless eyes from existence? Only because he was dead? Did his death, did his suffering somehow expiate his sacrilegious disregard of a promise, made before God, to love no other woman before Mrs. MacLeod?

  But Gerhard, she thinks. Didn’t Gerhard break this same vow, while Elfriede was away in Switzerland? And didn’t she forgive his faithlessness? Isn’t this a weakness common to men, who are made to range far and spread their seed, while women, cursed creatures, must remain at home to reap it?

  And Gerhard loved her so. Surely no man could have loved a woman more passionately than Gerhard once loved Elfriede. Still, when faced with a nurse, sympathetic to his struggles and his sexual needs, he cast aside these vows.

  “Elfriede.”

  She lifts her head. Wilfred’s returned to the entrance of the folly. The river lies behind him, an impression of movement, almost impossible to distinguish from the purple sky.

  “Your woman in Paris,” she says. “What’s her name?”

  “My what?”

  “Your woman in Paris. The one you visit on your twenty-four-hour pass, which isn’t enough time to travel all the way to Scotland, of course, so you have to make do—”

  “Christ. Christ.”

  “I understand. I’ve been very stupid, very naive. You told me yourself, all those years ago, when a man’s at war he needs—what was it? Oblivion, you called it, the oblivion of carnal intercourse. He needs the comfort of women—”

  “Christ.”

  “I just want to know her name, that’s all. Her Christian name. What is it? Marie? Josephine?”

  “And here I thought this was all about our son, about Johann and me on opposite sides, about your goddamn existential grief—”

  Elfriede jumps to her feet. “Of course it’s about that! For you I’ve given up everything, I’ve given up my country and my language, I’ve given up my own son! To give you a daughter, I nearly gave up my own life! Every day I sit among these English women who hate me, I drink their tea and listen to them talk about those barbarian Germans, this terrible country, these men who spear babies and rape women, barbarians like my own son! I do this for you, Wilfred. For you I’m forced to pray against my own homeland. To pray against the child of my own body. Now I’m going to die to give you another child. And this is how you repay my loyalty. I thought my loyalty might somehow guarantee yours, like a treaty between countries, but I guess we’ve seen what comes of that—”

  “Elfriede, stop—”

  “At least, when this baby kills me, you’ll be free. You can have all the women you like, you won’t have to hold yourself back—”

  He crosses the floor and grabs her shoulders. “Just be quiet. For God’s sake. I can’t stand it.”

  “Let go. Let go.”

  “You’re not going to die, do you hear me? Is that what this is about? You’re strong and healthy. You’re not going to die. Elfriede, you can’t die.”

  Inexplicably, her arms have circled his neck. She can’t seem to pull them away. “It doesn’t matter,” she whispers. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter. It’s God’s will.”

  “You’re not going to die.”

  “I’m thirty-eight. I’m not the girl I was. You’re not the man you were, you’ve changed, you’re not Wilfred anymore—”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “You’re not. It’s changed you.”

  His chest moves slightly, as if he’s about to reply. Nothing comes, however, no denial. Instead the truth settles upon them like a single shroud. A Cloth of Tears.

  Elfriede told her husband about this cloth about a week after Margaret’s birth. The doctors had stopped the bleeding, but she was so pale and depleted she couldn’t lift her head from the pillow, and now a fever had set in. Every two hours, she demanded the nurses bring her the baby so she could feed, even though she couldn’t hold Margaret on her own, she simply could not move her arms. A nurse kept the little body in place at her breast while Wilfred paced and paced along the corridor outside. Elfriede remembers lying feverishly in bed, feeling the pull of Margaret’s mouth as the only thing attaching her to the living world. Soon even that sensation had begun to dim, she began to feel instead the separation of her soul from her body, and she called for Wilfred.

  He came, white-faced and skeletal, full of remorse. He had done this thing to her, after all, he had fathered this child that had drawn away Elfriede’s lifeblood. His bright hair stuck out from his head. From his jaw, too, from his chin, because he hadn’t shaved all week. When he saw Elfriede’s face, he dropped to his knees beside the bed and tried to speak. He didn’t know she couldn’t really hear anything, that her ears had retreated from the world. With tremendous effort, she shook her head. She told him, in broken, whispered words, about this handkerchief in her drawer which was to cover her face when they buried her.

  On Wilfred’s face, remorse turned to anguish. He didn’t understand. This relic from her first marriage? From her wedding to the baron? She wished to be buried with this?

  So Elfriede tried to explain that this tradition was all she had left of her old life, of her family, of Germany itself. She had kept it in her drawer to ward off sorrow, and sorrow had come anyway, so the Cloth of Tears must be buried with her. It was the only way. You couldn’t break a custom like that.

  No, he said. No. He laid his hand atop her face, as if to check for breath. You won’t die, my love, you cannot die. Elfriede, you cannot die.

  Somehow, though she couldn’t really hear, she heard these words. Maybe it was the vibration, or the movement of his lips, or something deeper than words that moved between them, because after all his heart still beat in her chest, and her heart beat in his. Anyway, she remembers thinking as she lay there, listening to Wilfred by whatever means, held down to earth by his fingers along the bridge of her nose, by his palm hovering above her mouth, But I am already dead.

  This is my Cloth of Tears.

  Clearly, the idea was premature. From that day, that hour perhaps, Elfriede began an almost imperceptible climb back to health. The blood returned to her veins, drop by drop. In a month, she could sit up in bed as her daughter nursed at her breast. How she stared at that downy blond head, how she stroked that round, hungry cheek with her finger, as if by doing so she could summon some emotion, some tiny spark, anything at all to lighten the despair that enshrouded her. As if, by touching this creature who had innocently broken her, Elfriede could repair her defective self. Of course, she couldn’t.

  Take her, she sometimes said to Wilfred, who hardly left her side even to wash. Take her away. Go somewhere, all of you. You don’t deserve this, you deserve more than me.

  But he wouldn’t go. Persistent, perverse, pumpkin-headed soldier. He did exactly the opposite. Week after week, month after month, he would, in these blackest moments, climb into the bed beside her and hold her in much the way you might hold a child, in a way that asked nothing at all of her except her mere existence in that bed, being held. Sometimes he would call in Johann too, and the four of them would lie there together, and Wilfred would say something silly to make Johann giggle, and the day eventually came when Elfriede, despite herself, giggled too. The next morning she rose from the bed and saw that it was springtime.

  So the Cloth of Tears remained where it was, inside her drawer, untouched and nearly forgotten.

  And now, a decade later, those words have returned. Elfriede, you cannot die.
Husband and wife stand before each other in the darkened folly, enshrouded by truth. The robin’s fallen silent with the arrival of night. Elfriede’s head makes a slow, heavy descent to Wilfred’s chest.

  “This barbarous war,” she says.

  “Yes.”

  “We can’t survive it.”

  “Nobody can.”

  For some reason, although she’s rested against Wilfred a million times, she thinks of that morning in Switzerland, when she sat on the fallen log and her head touched Wilfred’s chest for the first time. How she listened to the beat of his heart and the movement of air in his damaged lungs. How they seemed like a miracle to her, these vital signs, these proofs of Wilfred’s existence. She listens to them now as if they’re new to her, as if they belong to a different man, and as those thuds and whooshes fill her head, Elfriede realizes that she and Wilfred have been speaking in German, for the first time in two years. Of course, from the beginning of their marriage, they always spoke English in public, in front of the servants and Wilfred’s family, but German remained their private language, the dialect of their intimacy. Until that catastrophic summer of 1914, when a major in the British Army had—like Caesar’s wife—to set himself above suspicion, and Elfriede’s native tongue disappeared from their lives as if it had never been spoken. Now it returns, just as the last instant of sunlight vanishes over the curve of the earth, and they have nothing left to say to each other.

  Or do they? Elfriede senses a stirring in Wilfred’s chest, like something wants out of there. She thinks, No, don’t say it, don’t say some stupid, comforting thing, some wretched apology. But it’s not enough. Something must be said.

  “I should have given it up, shouldn’t I? I should have resigned my commission when we married. Taken some position at a bank.”

  Elfriede rouses herself. “No. You’d have been miserable at a bank. You’re too good at this.”