On their honeymoon, Louis took her to Europe for six months. They visited his ancestral homeland, over the Rhine from where she still had relatives. They rented châteaux; they were received by heads of state, escorted in grand fashion from one magnificent edifice to another, shown the world’s greatest art in private sessions, allowed to press their noses right up against the canvas, to run their fingers along the gold and silver surfaces. What she remembers most of all are the Michelangelos. Not the muscular David or the languid Pietà but the rough, unfinished Florentine sculptures, human form struggling to wrest itself from a solid block of marble. That has always been her great battle, a lifelong battle, won by divestiture. We shed; we lighten and rise.
She came over at the age of five, and in the beginning she was friendless. The other girls teased her about the way she said the letter s. It came out as a z. Or when she said shpelling instead of spelling. They would tease her about that, too. Shhhh they would say, laughing their little heads off. Shhhhhh. A clever joke, at once playing on her shortcomings and telling her that what she had to say was of no interest to anyone.
Her accent, then—that had to go. Day in and day out she sat with the tutor. She sells seashells by the seashore, the shells she sells are surely seashells. The exercises made her jaw ache. They numbed her with boredom. She worked. She chipped away at herself—the z’s and sh’s falling off, bits of stone and clouds of dust—until she sounded like any other American girl. It was a painful process but a worthwhile one, certainly after the War broke out.
Off came her baby fat. She kept herself away from certain foods, and gradually she emerged as a woman who could turn heads in the street. Boys wanted to be by her side, and girls wanted to be by the sides of the boys. She shed her timorousness, shed her resentment, generously extending friendship to those who had maligned her in childhood. She shed her inhibitions, becoming known as a girl not only of exceptional beauty but of great wit. She tamped down an unbecoming tendency toward sarcasm and built up a tolerance for the inanity of social niceties. She entertained drawing rooms with lightning-fast passages from the Goldberg Variations. Everyone applauded. She learned to enjoy parties, to laugh on cue, to reflect in others what they most wanted to see.
By her eighteenth birthday, several men had asked for her hand. She turned them down. She had bigger plans, and so did her mother.
Her father thought them both ridiculous, and said so.
“I don’t see why you say that,” said Mama. “They like German girls. And I know that they will want to marry that one off as soon as possible.”
Mama was right. Bertha marveled. One moment she was a debutante; the next she was a bride, dancing with her husband in a ballroom as big as her imagination.
The first years of her marriage were her happiest. She barely noticed her husband’s lack of interest in her; she was too busy making the most of her newfound omnipotence. Papa was rich, but nobody was rich like the Mullers. It became a challenge for her to dream up new ways to spend. And still she continued to rise, cultivating important relationships and pruning dead ones. She invited and was invited by others. Her wardrobe was the envy of all, her clothing cut closely in homage to her figure. She became a regular in the society pages, noted for her grace but also for her charitable work. In her name grew a concert hall and a collection at the Met. She endowed functions and sponsored schoolchildren. She was only twenty-one but already she had done so much good. Her parents were proud; her life was full; and if her husband did not desire her, so much the better. It freed her up to work on refining herself, a new person, reborn as a Muller. It was she who had to ensure the bloodline. Louis could not be trusted. He had done everything in his power to sabotage his family’s future. She came to stitch up the damage, and in doing so, she took possession of her new name in a way that he—a Muller by dint of Fate—never could. Unlike Louis, she had to work, to position herself, to choose; she became more of a Muller than he ever was; and thus her obligation ran much deeper than his, her mandate divine. How else to explain the rapidity of her ascent? Someone wanted her to succeed.
And she made sure Louis did his duty when the time came around.
During the early part of Bertha’s first pregnancy, Mama died. Before she went, she said, “I only hope your children take such good care of you.”
The disappointment, then, was twofold. Bertha felt as though she had denied her mother’s deathbed wish. After all, no defective child could ever take care of her. And the shame she stood to reap: oh the shame. Her whole life would fly apart, springs and gears and hinges scattering. All the good she did would come to naught. Who would give the kind of charity that she did if not her? Who would throw the Autumn Ball? Who would be the focal point? She had obligations to the people of New York City.
An accent, an inch of waistline, a recalcitrant husband—the problems she fought always had clear and concrete solutions. She likewise approached the problem of the girl with a level head and a steady hand. This, too, was merely another problem to solve; the real question was how. The Home gave her her answer. Dr. Fetchett told them that such a decision was not uncommon, and she took comfort in knowing that she was following a well-beaten path. For every hurdle rising higher.
What she finds so troubling about the latest turns of events, this abomination, is the sense that she has stalled. Or worse—begun to sink. She sees now that the problem of the girl will never be solved, not as long as people have the capacity to reproduce themselves. Family is the problem that recurs.
IN AUGUST, DAVID RETURNS FROM BERLIN. He entertains his parents with stories of his travels, and shares his firsthand account of the rising political turmoil. Louis, who has been following the news closely, speculates about their economic effects. Several high-ranking officers in his Frankfurt branch have been forced out of their jobs, a trend that Louis disapproves of. Jewish or not, they were fine businessmen, and nobody with half a brain can believe that stripping a nation of its most qualified and experienced workers will lead to greater prosperity.
Having left at so young an age, Bertha has no strong feelings about the annexation of Austria or the breaking of synagogue windows, events that she does not regard as having any direct impact on her. She is happy to have her son back, to have the tableau of her life reestablished. Lately, she and Louis have spoken even less than usual, and his willfulness angers her. He has never fought back as hard as he is fighting now.
His chief complaint is that she has not gone to visit the girl. He goes every two weeks. Would it kill her, he wants to know, to show her face?
But she can’t. There are so many reasons why. Somebody needs to stay at home. What if a guest drops by unannounced. They couldn’t both be out of the house, now could they? People would want to know where the Mullers had gone in the thick of summer. The Mullers live fashionably, and what they do influences the whole crowd of Good People. Inquiries would be made; a rumor would ignite. One of them, at least, has to stay behind, and she is the more reasonable choice.
Besides, how could she help? Having been pregnant herself, Bertha knows that it is a highly individualized form of suffering. She knows how to soothe only one pregnant woman: herself. Whereas the doctor has soothed hundreds. Let him do his job.
And most of all she is afraid, afraid of feeling the way she felt for those few short minutes at the Home, afraid of feeling the way she felt during the drive back to New York, afraid of having her heart once again turned upside down.
Would it kill her to show her face?
It might.
One night they are eating when a maid appears with a folded note, which she places on the table. Madam. Bertha is about to scold her for interrupting dinner when she notices that the note has opened slightly, revealing at the bottom the name E. F. Fetchett, M.D. She slides it under the base of her wineglass.
After dinner she sequesters herself in her sewing room.
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Muller—
Kindly request your immediate attention by telephone.
Sincerely,
E. F. Fetchett, M.D.
She picks up the line and asks for Tarrytown four-eight-oh-five-eight.
The doctor answers. In the background there are sounds.
“This is Mrs. Louis Muller,” she says.
“Labor has begun. I thought you might want to know.”
Bertha fingers the phone cord.
“Mrs. Muller?”
“I’m here.”
“Will you be present for the birth?”
She looks at the clock. It is eight thirty. “Will she last til tomorrow morning?”
“I don’t think so, no.”
“Then I won’t be present,” she says, and hangs up.
THE NEXT MORNING, she orders a picnic packed. She and David spend the day in Central Park.
WHEN LOUIS RETURNS FROM TARRYTOWN late that night, he looks as though he has run the entire distance on foot. His tie is gone, his shirt sweat-stained and missing studs. He goes directly to his suite and shuts the door.
“What’s wrong with Father?”
“He’s ill. Did you have a good time today?”
“Yeah.”
“Excuse me? I didn’t understand that.”
“Yes.”
“Yes what.”
“Yes, Mother.”
“You’re welcome. Who loves you more than anyone else in the world?”
“You do, Mother.”
“That’s right. What are you doing after supper?”
“Practicing my violin.”
“And?”
“Reading.”
“And?”
“Listening to the Yankee game.”
“I don’t remember that being on the agenda.”
“Can we put it on the agenda? Please?”
“Practice first.”
“Yes, Mother. May I be excused?”
“Certainly.”
He lays down his napkin. Good boy.
“Mother?”
“Yes, David.”
“Can I visit Father?”
“Not tonight.”
“Will you please tell him that I hope he feels better?”
“I certainly will.”
When he is gone, Bertha lingers at the table, rubbing her temples. The maid asks if she would like anything else.
“I am going to see my husband. I don’t want to be disturbed under any circumstances. Is that clear?”
“Yessum.”
She steps in the elevator and girds herself for battle.
HE ARRIVED IN THE VILLAGE as the heat peaked. The air blurry with gnats, the sweet rot of manure, half-naked children throwing water at one another. The chauffeur steered along the rutted road and forked onto the rural byway leading to the cottage they chose—Bertha chose—their advance halted by a cattleguard and a swing-arm gate that necessitates stopping the car, getting out, opening the gate, driving through, and stopping again to close the gate behind. Louis ordered the chauffeur to leave it open. He didn’t care who might wander in. Let them.
As he stepped inside the cottage, he felt nauseated and dizzy, and his instinct was to reach for his wife’s arm. Since his last visit, the place had been converted into an operating theater. A pile of bedsheets, rank with antiseptic and bodily fluids. The quiet disturbed him: shouldn’t there be crying? Ruth herself barely made any noise as a newborn, and he had always understood that to be symptomatic of her condition. What if her child is the same way? What untold miseries will he endure?
Dr. Fetchett looked cadaverous, although he had only good things to say. The baby was a boy, his heartbeat strong and regular. The mother’s health was excellent; better, in fact, than many normal mothers after a similar ordeal. In the interest of cleaning up, they had moved both mother and child to the neighboring cottage, where nurses were attending to her.
“How is she, is she happy?”
The doctor rubbed his cheek thoughtfully. “Who can say, really.”
They went first to see the baby. Red and squashed and swaddled; black, spiky hair on the top of his head. Utterly ordinary.
Actually, he looked a little like Bertha.
Dr. Fetchett explains that it is indeed possible for a mongoloid mother to have a normal child. “Of course, we can’t say for sure that other problems won’t arise down the line. I say that not to disturb you but because I’m trying to prepare you for any eventuality.”
Louis asked to hold him. In his arms the baby felt like paper.
“Should he be that red?”
“It’s normal.”
At first he is relieved. Normal, normal, everything normal. But the longer he holds the sleeping boy in his arms, the more clearly he comes to see that normalcy is the worst curse of all. If the child is normal, he represents a claim on the estate and a threat to David’s sovereignty. Louis can only imagine what Bertha might do.
The doctor asks if Mrs. Muller will be coming to visit.
Louis said, “I don’t believe she will.”
Now, lying on the floor of his drawing room to quiet his screaming back, looking up at Bertha—she towers over him, standing behind two armchairs she has pulled together like an embrasure—he says, “The child is dead. The girl is dead, too. They both died in childbirth.”
A MONTH LATER, under the pretext of business travel, Louis goes back to the Home.
“I want to know the name of the father.”
Dr. Christmas’s eyes dart around the room, in search of his missing legal counsel.
Louis says, “My wife doesn’t know I’m here. The least you can do is help me give the boy a proper name.”
After a moment, the doctor goes to a cabinet and takes out a file. He hands Louis a photo of a young man with wild, dark hair; wild, dark eyes.
“His name is Cracke,” says the doctor.
Louis compares features. “A patient.”
“Yes.”
“He doesn’t look defective.”
“He had other problems. Many of them. A troublesome boy.”
Louis puts the photo down. He should be feeling something. Anger, perhaps, or disgust. But he feels nothing, only mild curiosity.
“How did he know my daughter?”
The doctor shifts uncomfortably. “I can’t say. As you’re aware, we segregate the sexes. Sometimes for a concert we bring everyone into the main hall. Presumably, they slipped out together unnoticed.”
Louis frowns. “Do you mean that she went consensually?”
“I would have to think so,” says the doctor. “She asked for him repeatedly.”
Louis says nothing.
“He’s no longer with us.”
Louis is confused. “He’s dead?”
“I ordered him moved.”
“And where is he now?”
"At another home, some miles outside Rochester.”
"Does he know?”
“I don’t imagine so.”
“Are you going to tell him?”
“I hadn’t planned on it.”
“Please don’t.”
As he opens the car door for Louis, the doctor smiles unctuously and says, “I hope you don’t find it rude of me to ask how Ruth is. We were all quite fond of her.”
“She’s right as rain,” Louis says.
The doctor offers his hand. Louis declines.
HE HIRES A STAFF OF THREE, overseen by an anvil-jawed Scotswoman named Nancy Greene, a former employee at the Home. She is kind to Ruth, kinder still to the baby; she understands—or seems to understand— when Louis presses upon her the importance of keeping secrets. No good could come of anyone knowing, he tells her, and she seems to agree. He pays her very well.
IN 1940, THE WORLD IS AT WAR. David has entered his first year of formal schooling at the N. M. Priestly Academy, and Bertha has been reelected president of her women’s club, a position to which she devotes increasingly large amounts of time once her son leaves the house on Fifth. The Frankfurt office has been closed since the invasion of Poland, and the Muller Corporation has
begun to shift its priorities from international banking to domestic property management, which Louis regards as a more stable arena for investment. His instincts will prove prescient when American GIs begin coming home and the demand for housing skyrockets. But that will not happen for years. At the moment, he is operating on a hunch.
November is wet and cold. The worst storm in a decade comes and goes, leaving Manhattan smelling of earthworms. Louis sits in his office on the fiftieth floor of the Muller Building.
Few people know the number for the phone that rings directly at his desk.
He answers. It is Nancy Greene.
“Sir, she’s very sick.”
He cancels his afternoon meetings. When he arrives at the cottage, he spots a dire sign: Dr. Fetchett’s mud-spattered car.
“I can’t control her fever. She needs to be moved to a hospital.”
Despite their best efforts, the infection rages out of control, and within a week Ruth is dead of pneumonia. Dr. Fetchett attempts to console Louis by telling him that in general, people with her condition have a short life expectancy. That she lived as long as she did—and went as fast—is a kind of blessing.
Louis buries her on the grounds. No clergy are present. The nurses sing a hymn. Mrs. Greene stays inside to mind baby Victor.
• 19 •
I didn’t talk to Marilyn for several weeks. When I did call, a few days after the new year, I was told by her assistant that she had gone to Paris.
"For how long?”
“I’m not supposed to tell you. I’m not actually supposed to tell you she’s in Paris, either, so you didn’t hear it from me.”
I suppose I didn’t have the right to be angry at her, but I was. I felt as though I was the aggrieved, that she had no right to be hurt; as far as I knew, I had been acting with her permission. I reacted the way I did after my mother’s death, the way I always have whenever I’ve felt, or been made to feel, rightfully ashamed. Narcissism can’t stomach too much guilt. It vomits back up rage. I thought of all the times Marilyn had wronged me— all the gibes I’d taken, the condescension I’d swallowed with a smile. I thought of how she often treated me like arm candy and how she interfered in the running of my business. I thought of her forcing me to kiss her when my head felt like a rock tumbler. To this list of crimes I added others that had nothing to do with me; I labeled her a homewrecker, a vengeful divorcée, a liar, a bully. I erased her kindnesses and inflated her cruelties until she seemed so bad to me, so thoroughly corrupt, that her unwillingness to overlook my tiny indiscretion became the height of hypocrisy. And just as I got through holding her responsible for global warming and the burst of the dot-com bubble, I reached into my jacket to take out my phone and leave her a voicemail telling her exactly what I thought, and instead of the phone I found a stray price tag that someone at Barneys had forgotten to remove. The upper portion of my outfit had cost Marilyn $895.00, plus 8.375 percent sales tax.
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