The Golden Hour

by Beatriz Williams

  “No, you do it.”

  I unbuckle the straps, which is no easy chore, believe me. The leather’s stiff, the metal rusted. At last they pull apart, and I lift the flap at the top and reach inside. One by one, I pull out the objects, the socks, the field dressings, the gun oil, the gas mask, the shirts, the soap, the mess kit, the shaving kit—

  Margaret snatches up the shaving kit and unties the knot with her fingernails, pick pick pick, until at last it comes loose and the belt unrolls, the scissors and razor and brush all stuck in their little slots, gleaming as if they were new. She pulls out the scissors and touches the tip with her fingers, and I think of my bathroom on Cable Beach, and how I kept shaving soap and razor and toothbrush in the cabinet, and how I liked to lean against the windowsill and watch my lover shave, fascinated at his concentration, the series of contortions, the new pink skin revealed in the stroke of the razor, the smell of the soap, his naked shoulders. How, when he was gone, I would sometimes rise in the middle of the night and take the razor from its jar and inspect the blade to see if some tiny hair still clung to the edge, some relic of Thorpe.

  An hour passes. Margaret inspects each item, strokes it, sniffs it. She doesn’t cry, she doesn’t say a word. I think it’s too much for tears, too much for her to comprehend all at once like this. Annie sits with her knees to her chest, her arms wrapped around her legs, watching us. At one point she checks her watch and says old Mrs. Thorpe will want her lunch.

  “All right,” Margaret says. “I suppose we can come back this afternoon.”

  She staggers to her feet, and so do I. The cold and damp have had the same effect on our living flesh as on the leather. For a moment or two, she stands there staring at the bag, the artifacts placed around it. She sets her hands on her hips.

  “Coming?” I ask.

  She bends down and picks up a bundle of letters and a notebook.

  “Coming.”

  Old Mrs. Thorpe keeps to her bed, thoroughly senile, next to an array of pill bottles and powder packets. She married young, Margaret explained on the train, but Thorpe’s father arrived only after several years of fruitlessness, like one of those flowers that blooms every century or so. Margaret’s not sure precisely how old she is, but probably ninety-five, God bless her. Now she’s propped against the pillows on what will probably become her deathbed, while Annie spoons soup into her mouth and replies patiently to all her crazy talk. I think of my mother back on Long Island, at the table in the kitchen, drinking her coffee while her chicks fly free.

  “Let me do it,” I say.

  Annie looks up in surprise. Over by the window, Margaret puts down her cigarette and laughs. “Decent of you, Lulu, but it’s not going to bring him back.”

  “It’s not for Thorpe.” I settle on the chair, take the soup from Annie, and peer into Mrs. Thorpe’s hopeful face. Her hair is uniformly white, but something tells me this is the redhead in the family tree. I should mention that she’s chattering away as all this takes place. You can’t really understand the words—aside from the Scotch brogue, she’s got no teeth—but whatever she’s saying, the woman’s got a lot of it to communicate. I wait until she pauses for breath and stick the spoon in the hole. She swallows it down and smiles gummily, like when the twins were babies, and I think it’s maybe just as well I’m getting the practice, isn’t it? How, if we’re lucky to survive the measles and the tree climbing, the wars and the childbirth, disease and famine and Hitler and Tito and the crosstown bus barreling down Fifty-Ninth Street, we come right back to the beginning before heading west into the unknown, to meet our Maker just as we left him, helpless.

  The feeding of Mrs. Thorpe takes some time, and Annie and Margaret retire to the kitchen, where at least there’s a range to keep the air warm. I occupy this hour by telling her a little about me, about how I met her grandson, what a dear fellow he is, how the king of England married us, how I’ve got a bun in the oven already, her great-grandchild. I leave out the part about Colditz, not because I don’t want to upset her—she doesn’t understand a word I’m saying—but because I don’t want to upset myself. It seems to me that this is a moment for fairy tales, for a story that ends well, for a fiction you know is a fiction that comforts you anyway.

  When the spoon scrapes a final time against the bowl, and the lady deigns to accept this offering, I wipe her mouth carefully with the napkin, settle her comfortably on her pillows, and ask if there will be anything else, Mrs. Thorpe.

  “Johann,” she says clearly.

  I beg her pardon.

  “Dear boy. Hair like his mama.”

  (Understand, if you please, that she speaks in a toothless, whistling lisp, so I may not be translating precisely.)

  “Ah. Yes. They were both blond, weren’t they?”

  “But she was mad, poor thing. What could I do?” She looks at me earnestly, like a moment of clarity has come upon her and she wants to know this thing, she really wants to know what she could have done, other than what she did.

  “Buried her properly, perhaps.”

  “I couldn’t let the children see her, not the state she was in.”

  “I’m sure she forgives you,” I said, not that I had any such confidence. On the other hand, from the look of things, Mrs. Thorpe would be discovering the limits of her daughter-in-law’s forgiveness firsthand, before long.

  Mrs. Thorpe claws a little at the edge of the sheets. “I had no choice. But he understood. He’s a good boy. A good son.”

  “Do you mean Wilfred?”

  Her eyes make little spasms of effort, remembering. She nods and says, “Wilfie,” and then the words fall into babbling again. I give the blankets a final pat and rise from my chair, bid her good afternoon, tell her Annie will be back soon with her tea. And indeed, when I descend the stairs and find the kitchen, the kettle’s whistling on the top of the range, and Annie’s spooning leaves into a blue-and-white teapot. Margaret sits at the table before a dozen or so letters, arranged in orderly rows. A cigarette smokes away in the ashtray at her elbow. She makes no sign of noticing my arrival. I carry the bowl and spoon to the sink and wash them, dry them, set them in the cupboard. Through the window, I spy a patch of blue sky, a gleam of sunshine on the wet grass. I sit down at the table and Annie sets a cup of tea before me. When I reach for one of the letters, the nearest, Margaret snaps—not looking up—Don’t touch!

  “Sorry.” I stir in the milk and the honey.

  Margaret lifts her cigarette, drags lengthily, places it back in the ashtray. She’s holding a letter in her left hand, and though I don’t mean to snoop, I can’t help noticing that it’s typewritten.

  “Find anything interesting?” I ask.

  “They’re all interesting.”

  “I mean anything in particular.”

  “Annie,” she says. “Tea.”

  Annie rolls her eyes and sets the teacup in the patch of bare table next to the ashtray. Brings the milk and the honey. Margaret adds both and stirs with the teaspoon, clinkety clink, without taking her eyes from the paper before her.

  “What’s that?” I say. “The Magna Carta or something?”

  “It’s in French, that’s all.”

  “Let me have it, then. I’m practically fluent.”

  She shoots me a murderous glance over the top of the paper. “So am I. It’s just that I can’t make heads or tails of what’s in it. Annie?”

  “Yes, Miss Margaret?”

  “You don’t remember any legal dealings in Paris, do you? Oh, Lord. Of course not. You were the housemaid.”

  “It’s from a lawyer?” I ask.

  “Yes,” she says, snapping again.

  “Do you mind if I—”

  “It’s none of your business.”

  I set my hands around the teacup. “I disagree. I think it is my business. He’s my father-in-law, isn’t he?”

  “He’s my father.”

  “I’m carrying his only grandchild.”

  She tosses the paper to the table. “Are you
certain of that, darling?”

  “What the devil does that mean?”

  Margaret picks up the cigarette, smokes it; picks up the tea and drinks that. The cup rattles in the saucer when she returns it. Her eyes are a little glassy, I think.

  “Maybe that’s not his only grandchild, I mean.” She makes a thin, bitter smile. “It seems my father was paying a lawyer in Paris to track down a certain woman and her daughters.”

  “Oh, dear.”

  “And what’s more, it seems he succeeded.”

  “How—how—”

  “How the mighty are fallen, perhaps?” She points her cigarette to the letter. “See for yourself, then. I don’t give a damn.”

  I reach across the table and pluck the letter from atop the layer of envelopes, all of which are addressed, I perceive, in the same elegant handwriting, to Maj. W. B. Thorpe. Except this one, typewritten, dated the thirtieth of June. The day before he went into battle. Margaret lights herself another cigarette and rises from her chair to stare out the window above the sink. She’s wearing another of her shapeless housedresses, which hangs from her slender frame, reminding me a little of the duchess. The same shape, except it’s not cultivated, it’s not fashioned the way you fashion a mannequin, it’s not displayed to its best advantage. It’s just what it is, a woman who’s naturally slender, who isn’t eating as well as she should, smoking too many cigarettes, fretting.

  From time to time, the duchess liked to speak to me in French, in order to polish her fluency. So while it’s been some time since I picked up a work of French literature, or wrote out a sentence or a paragraph in that language, I find I can read the words pretty well, without stopping to translate in my head. When I come to the woman’s name, I look up.

  “Charlotte Kassmeyer? But that’s not a French name.”

  “No. They’re German. Look at the children’s names.”

  I turn back to the letter. “Ursula, Frederica, Gertrud. How odd.”

  “There’s nothing odd about it. Probably some woman he met when he was stationed somewhere, before the war. He arranges for her to live in a nice little flat in Paris, so as to be conveniently nearby. Men, they’re jolly clever, aren’t they?”

  “Then why was he paying a lawyer to find her?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t especially care. It all adds up to the same sum, doesn’t it?” She blows out a cloud of smoke. “Poor Mama. No wonder.”

  “No wonder?”

  “No wonder she was so unhappy. All that time, you know, I thought they were in love. I thought—I thought they were like a fairy tale, like the prince and princess in a story for children—”

  “You don’t know that. He might have been making arrangements for another officer, someone who was killed. That would explain—”

  “Stop.”

  “But—”

  She whirls to face me. “Stop, damn it. Read me those names again.”

  I pick up the paper and skim the paragraphs. “Ursula, Frederica, Gertrud.”

  Margaret marches back to the table and snatches up the letter. “Ursula. Ursula Kassmeyer.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “It must be a coincidence.”

  “Miss Margaret! The cigarette!” cries Annie.

  The corner of the page has begun to smoke. Margaret swears and drops the cigarette in the ashtray, pinches out the flame with her fingers. The smell of scorched paper fills the air.

  “What’s the matter?” I say. “Who the devil’s Ursula Kassmeyer?”

  “It’s got to be a coincidence.” Margaret looks up and meets my gaze, and the gloss is gone from her eyes. They’re a bright, pale blue, animated, sizzling with life. “It’s just that we’ve got an operative by that name in the German section. One of our best. She runs an escape line into Switzerland for downed pilots and Jews.”

  Part V

  Lulu

  November 1943

  (The Bahamas)

  I have said before that there was more than a little of the American spirit in the Bahamas, the American way of doing things, owing to the fact that Miami lay a trifling distance to the west, whereas London rose from an island on the other side of a notoriously tempestuous ocean. Still. Bahamians clung to certain inscrutable British traditions, and a Nassau courtroom is just about indistinguishable from Old Bailey itself, down to the frizzled gray wigs and the so-called dock in which the prisoner is kept during the proceedings, like an animal in a cage.

  It’s a grave thing, after all, to put a man on trial for his life. A grave thing, to accuse a man of murdering another man, and—like marriage—not to be undertaken lightly, or for base purposes. On the last day of Alfred de Marigny’s trial for the murder of Sir Harry Oakes, I sat in the press gallery for some time after the concluding arguments were made, after the judge gave his summation and instructions to the jury, after the members of the jury filed out of the courtroom to deliberate de Marigny’s guilt or innocence.

  I stared at that prisoner’s dock, now empty, and considered all I had witnessed in the past several weeks, the testimonies, the facts I had already known and the startling facts I had learned. The faces. There was Freddie himself, of course, all calm demeanor and earnest eloquence. Lady Oakes, crushed by grief. Nancy de Marigny, resolute, pretty, courageously pale. Harold Christie, white knuckles gripping the rail, perspiring ferociously, though it was autumn and the courtroom was not especially hot. The two detectives from Miami, old associates of the duke, whom he had flown in specially to lead the investigation on the morning of the body’s discovery, because the Bahamas police (he claimed) were not up to the task. Slick, handsome, bumbling, all at once. In my head, though not my daily dispatches to the Associated Press, I called them the Keystone Kops.

  Then you had the faces we didn’t see, because their owners had disappeared, or died, or—as in the case of Colonel Erskine-Lindop, the former Bahamas police superintendent, a man of known integrity—been transferred abruptly to Trinidad. Those absences were perhaps more interesting, as I pointed out to my readers. More telling, you might say. Among them, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. It seemed the royal couple was called away to visit friends in the States just as proceedings got underway, so they could neither appear in court nor testify, although I understood that the duke arranged for detailed reports on the trial’s progress to be cabled to him daily from his good friend, Harold Christie, at no small trouble or expense. Which was good of him, don’t you think?

  By now, I sat alone in the gallery. The other journalists had rushed to queue up at the telephones and send their dispatches to eager editors around the globe. Even in time of war, it seems, people still give a damn about a single dead man on a small island off the coast of Florida, because he was rich and because he was a friend of the Duke of Windsor. Before me, a clerk gathered papers on the prosecutor’s table. The courtroom had turned hot and stuffy with the heat of so many people and so many electric lights. A rising wind rattled the windows. I rose from the bench and made my way downstairs and across the street to the Central Police Station, where Nancy de Marigny awaited the verdict on the second floor.

  I found her on a sofa, flushed and fluttery, smoking an anxious cigarette. Her mother was elsewhere, having taken exception to Nancy’s support for the accused, and I thought there was something rather moving about Nancy’s solitude.

  “Oh, there you are,” she said to me. “What do you think?”

  I settled myself rather heavily on the cushion beside her. “What do I think? I think twelve sensible men couldn’t convict Bonnie and Clyde from the evidence presented. But then again”—I shook my head at the cigarette case she presented to me—“I’m not a man, am I?”

  She made this hysterical little laugh. I figured she must be on her last nerve by now, but what did I know? I had begun to harbor a tremendous admiration for Mrs. de Marigny. Most women, already shocked by the brutal murder of a beloved father, would succumb to nervous collapse at the mere suggestion that a beloved husband had committed t
his atrocity himself. But Nancy, you understand, was not most women. She seemed almost to thrive under the scrutiny of the press, the attention of every spectator. No actress could have played her part more heroically in that witness chair. She waved away a little cigarette smoke and said, “Well, I hope you’re right.”

  “Oh, you heard the judge. My goodness. What did he say in that summation of his? Never in all his years seen a case handled like that, evidence mishandled, testimony fabricated, et cetera. I wonder if he really meant that bit about recommending an investigation into the whole mess.”

  “I hope so. I’ll hope it’s got them scared, all right, I mean everyone who had a hand in this. Everyone who wanted to take Freddie down.”

  “Thank goodness they were so incompetent.”

  She laughed shrilly. “Those Miami policemen! I never saw such a pair of dunces. That idiot Barker was on the stand, sweating and stuttering and backtracking. Everybody could see those fingerprints were planted. Everybody.”

  She laid such an emphasis on that last word, I flinched. “Well, it won’t be long now. He’ll be vindicated, I’m sure of it.”

  Even to me, the words sounded hollow. Nancy looked at the clock. Six fifty-six in the evening, not even two hours since the jury had retired. Across the room, a pair of policemen lounged about their desks, pretending not to notice us.

  “What will you do when it’s over?” I asked.

  “Over? My God. I don’t know. Just to settle down with my husband, I guess.”

  “You deserve it. Everyone admires how you’ve handled yourself.”

  She flicked a little ash from her cigarette. “Except my mother, it seems. Speaking of which, where on earth has your husband gotten to? He’s missed all the excitement around here.”

  “You know how it is in wartime,” I said. “When you’re called away to serve king and country and all that. He sends his warmest regards.”