That evening, Leopold Beckhof telephoned and asked to talk to Richard. Esther said Richard had gone to meet him. Herr Beckhof said they had no appointment that he knew of, but he wanted to give Richard some instructions about a manuscript he was reading that weekend. He asked her to tell Richard to call him tomorrow morning. Esther felt curiously shaken when she hung up. She had suddenly remembered Lotte telling her several days ago that she had seen Richard and Frieda Meyer one evening about ten o’clock, having coffee together at the Rathskeller Restaurant. Esther had thought very little of it, had thought perhaps Richard had invited her for coffee after one of the late sessions with Leopold at the office. But she remembered Lotte’s amused smile when she had told her. Now Esther had a vision of Richard sitting opposite Frieda Meyer in some restaurant, having dinner. Could it be possible? That dowdy, colorless woman? She even wore horn-rimmed glasses. And hardly any lipstick. Esther evoked in her memory Frieda Meyer’s thick body sitting on the hassock in front of the fireplace, and tried to divine what Richard might possibly be attracted to. She lifted the telephone again, with the idea of calling Lotte and asking her outright if she suspected that anything was going on between Richard and Frieda, then put it down, thinking that the next time she saw Lotte would be more fitting, more dignified. Then this struck her as absurd, and she picked up the telephone and dialed Lotte’s number. “I called to ask you . . . a rather personal question, Lotte. You don’t have to answer it if you don’t want to.” But she heard Lotte’s sudden curiosity, and she was sure Lotte would be delighted to answer.
“Well, Esther—I thought you knew,” Lotte replied. “You must be the only person in Munich who doesn’t. Richard and Frieda had an affair that lasted for years before the war. Of course, when I told you I saw her with Richard in the Rathskeller, I didn’t mean to imply that I thought anything now. I mean, naturally I don’t think Richard would do a thing like that now that he’s married.”
Esther waited up till eleven in the living room, nervously smoking and trying to read. Richard came in at eleven-thirty. Esther asked him how the evening had gone, and Richard said fine, they had gotten a lot accomplished. “Leopold called here for you around eight o’clock. Did you see him?”
Richard’s lips parted stupidly for an instant, and Esther could fairly see the tremor that went through him. Then he said, “No, Leopold couldn’t join us. I saw the man alone.”
“With Frieda Meyer?”
Richard looked at her again the same way. “What’s this, Esther?”
Esther had decided on a direct approach. “Are you in love with Frieda Meyer? Is she in love with you?”
Richard laughed incredulously. “Mein Gott, Esther! How absurd!”
“Well, I know you were once,” Esther said.
Richard came toward her and put a hand under her chin. “I love you and I am married to you. To you,” he repeated.
“You swear that?” Esther asked.
“Yes!” Richard said, laughing.
Esther hesitated for a moment, then decided to believe him. But she could not keep from saying, “The reason I asked—I heard you were in the Rathskeller with Frieda one evening last week. You didn’t mention it to me. So I wondered.”
Richard frowned. “Who told you that?”
“But it is true, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Richard admitted readily. “I just wondered who took the trouble to tell you.”
“I’d rather not say,” Esther said. She took pleasure in keeping her source of information from Richard.
They went to bed that evening with hardly another word to each other.
Esther had another talk with Lotte. She hated Lotte for the pleasure she derived from the situation, but Esther found her a mine of information. Lotte had been to Frieda’s apartment once, and she knew that the woman with whom Frieda shared it was a hotel receptionist who worked from four till midnight, so Frieda’s apartment would be empty practically every evening. And she learned from Lotte that Frieda Meyer had a Prussian determination beneath her rather docile exterior, and that she had never made any bones about Richard’s being the only man she had ever cared for. The logical surmise was that she would try to get him back one day. Esther found she was not alarmed so much by Frieda as by what she knew of Richard’s own character. Richard was a creature of habit. He fretted a little under the obligations of marriage, and Frieda, especially in her present position, was the kind of woman who would probably make no demands on him. Esther could imagine him slipping back into a routine he had known with Frieda before the war—living apart from her but seeing her a few times a week, sleeping with her perhaps once a week. He could easily arrange that in his present schedule, and he might already have done so. One fact that led Esther to think this was that Richard seldom came home anymore before seven-thirty, for one reason or another, though Esther knew that his office closed before six. There would be no way of actually finding out, of course, without watching Frieda’s apartment house, and this Esther shrank from doing. Leopold Beckhof might know it, a half dozen other people might know it, but they would never betray Richard. People didn’t. Except people like Lotte, whom Esther despised for it.
Esther found herself with more and more time on her hands. The two maids had taken over every smallest chore of the household and, being gluttons for work, resisted Esther’s attempts to take back some of her old duties, like darning Richard’s socks, which she actually enjoyed. When Esther had an errand, she stretched it out as long as possible, strolling down Theatinerstrasse where the smartest shops were, stopping at a certain Konditorei where she drank a cup of good coffee with cream and ate one of the delicious pastries that filled the front windows. Then she would take a taxi home, and there would be an hour or more in which to write letters before Richard came home. Esther was a faithful correspondent with her friends in England. She had invited Tom Bradley and Edna to come over during the last two weeks in November, but Tom wrote that he had just taken a job, and couldn’t. Esther was now awaiting a letter from the Campbells, in answer to her invitation, though without much hope, because John had a job he couldn’t very well leave. And as to her other English friends, they had either too little money or too little time, she knew. Esther missed them sorely.
She might have overcome her boredom by taking a job, but she couldn’t in Munich because she was a British subject. All her women friends had jobs during the daytime, so there was no one she could call up to join her on a shopping tour, or to meet her for lunch somewhere. She might have called up Frau Krüger, or others like her of that group who were trying to get on friendlier terms with her and Richard, but as a point of pride, Esther forbade herself to seek them out. Esther felt actually hostile to these leechlike acquaintances now. She sensed that they took liberties, had a kind of arrogance of their own with her and Richard, because Richard after all was Jewish and therefore inferior to them. A certain woman with dyed red hair, a friend of Frau Krüger’s, had asked her point-blank last week if Richard was entirely Jewish or only part. No, anti-Semitism was far from dead in Germany. There had been the incident in Koebler’s Bakery, too. Esther had asked the bakery to deliver a large order for a tea, and she had spelled out her name and address for the salesgirl. Then Esther had become aware that the other women in the bakery were staring at her in a strange way, because she had a Jewish name, and that could mean only one thing: that she or her husband had crept back into Germany after once having been thrown out. Esther had never gone back to that particular bakery. And overshadowing all of her existence was her doubt of Richard, the fact that she had been brought to a point of doubting him, whether she had reason to or not.
Just before Christmas, Esther and Richard invited some fifteen people to a dinner party. Esther figured that the total cost would be over five hundred marks, which, plus the bills for two new rugs and the upstairs stove, would wipe out Richard’s salary for the month. She found a few ways to eco
nomize on the menu, and suggested them to Richard, but he told her not to bother, because he wanted the dinner to be perfect. Still, it bothered Esther, because at the rate they had been spending, she did not think they had been able to lay anything by in the three months they had been in Munich.
“Have we any reserve money, Richard?” she asked suddenly.
“Oh, we have a little,” he said.
“But don’t you think we should know exactly how much money we have to fall back on—and how much money I should and shouldn’t spend, now that we’re married?” The last word hung in the air, and she felt it had never meant so little to Richard as now, that in fact he hated the word and was ashamed that it applied to him.
“Have I ever said you were spending too much?” Richard asked with a smile.
Esther sighed, and gave it up. Richard had never shown her his bankbooks, even on the one or two occasions she had expressly asked to see them. She said, “Would you mind giving me some pocket money for the rest of the week? I went around town today with only two marks fifty in my purse. I couldn’t even have lunch with Greta when I ran into her, because I thought it might have cost more than I had.”
Richard at once pulled out his wallet and gave her thirty marks. Esther had an impulse to ask him again why she couldn’t have a regular allowance, but she knew what Richard would have said, that he didn’t have much on him just now, but that she could always come to him and he would give her what she needed.
Frieda Meyer came to the party. Richard had not told Esther he had invited her, though when Esther said this, Richard insisted that he had told her. But Esther knew that because Raimund von Hagen had been unable to come at the last minute, Richard had asked Frieda.
“I wish you’d go and talk with her,” Richard said to Esther. “She’s not nearly so standoffish as you think.”
“I tried a few minutes ago. She doesn’t want to talk to me,” Esther said. Esther left Richard and went over to the sofa, where Lotte and the Countess von Bernsdorf were sitting. Everyone was drinking an aperitif, and there was a lively, cheerful atmosphere in the room generated by the anticipation of a good dinner. All the editors of Beckhof and their wives were present, and some of the more attractive and intelligent people she and Richard knew, but it depressed Esther suddenly when she realized that none of them was anyone she could actually call a friend. Not even Lotte, who was her cousin.
Esther sat down beside Lotte. The Countess von Bernsdorf turned away for a moment, and Lotte remarked quickly to Esther, “I must say, Frieda looks a little out of place in this crowd. Do you suppose Leopold brought her along to take shorthand notes on the conversation?” Lotte said it in English, so it would not likely be overheard and understood. It was exactly what Esther had been vaguely thinking herself, and she felt her face grow warm. A half dozen questions she might have asked Lotte passed through her mind, but she could not utter any of them, surrounded as she was by other people. And one question she asked of herself: What are we doing here, Richard and I? What are we trying to prove by having these people here tonight? Whom are we trying to prove it to? For an instant, an irrational terror seized her, and she felt she was enduring some kind of punishment, an unending disgrace, in being here in Germany, and married to a half Jew who did not really love her. It was the same panicky feeling she had had that moment in Koebler’s Bakery.
All during the evening, Esther observed Richard’s and Frieda’s careful avoidance of each other. Frieda chatted with Leopold Beckhof at the table, and lingered around him after dinner, too, as if she were afraid of talking with the other guests. “If you invited Frieda, I should think you’d talk to her,” Esther said to Richard. “I don’t think she’s having a very good time.”
“Oh, all right,” Richard said. Then Esther watched Frieda’s dull, plump face come to life as Richard spoke to her and handed her a glass of brandy. Esther did not want anything more to drink. When her guests were busy with coffee and brandy in the living room, Esther slipped away to her room upstairs.
She sat down in front of her mirror and looked at herself critically. She saw that her hair and her face still looked exactly the same as at the beginning of the evening, only now she seemed much less attractive. The pouches under her eyes looked heavier. The interstices of her large teeth had become stained during the last year, and they looked worse when her face was pale as it was tonight. Lipstick made her even coarser and uglier, she thought, like a clown. Frieda Meyer, for all her lack of chic, was younger than she. Esther started at the light knock on her door.
It was Lotte. “We missed you,” Lotte said. “Are you all right, darling?” Esther tried to smile, too, tried to think of something casual to say, but she could not. “I’d like to know if you have heard anything else,” Esther said.
“About Richard?—N-not precisely, I suppose. But I talked with Leopold, and from what he implied, I assumed . . .” Lotte was completely in command of her words. She deliberately left the sentence dangling, and smiled at Esther again, tenderly. “I suppose one can only face it, darling. If you really want my opinion as a friend. I don’t think Richard’s the kind of man who can be told what he should and shouldn’t do. I suppose he thinks of Frieda as a rightful piece of property.”
(Oh, yes, Esther could see it, his making love to her without gallantry, without flowers, as if Frieda were an old chair he had come back to in Germany. Esther had come this far in her thoughts week ago. The only thing she was still uncertain of was whether she could take it, what she would do, how she would react in the horrible crisis that she imagined looming ahead, that would descend on her at some unpredictable moment.)
Lotte put her hand on her shoulder. “If there’s anything I can do, Esther—I hope you’ll feel free to come and talk to me at any time. Not that I’ve had any personal experience with this kind of thing, but I’ve known plenty of women who have.”
Esther could not look into Lotte’s face, because it was not the face of a friend at all. “Let’s go downstairs,” Esther said.
Esther did her duties as hostess faithfully the rest of the evening. Richard was generous with his French brandy. He seemed to be having a wonderful time. He was happier here than he had ever been in London, Esther knew. Richard was probably not the only man in the room tonight who was unfaithful to his wife, but in an English gathering, even among the artists and writers they had known in Chelsea, infidelity was the exception. And perhaps she had absorbed more of that English morality than she had realized, Esther thought, for she didn’t think she would have had these reactions had her first three husbands, in Germany, been unfaithful to her. Then there was the added disgrace that Frieda was a secretary, by no means Richard’s equal. And at Richard’s age, fifty-six, it seemed doubly absurd. She would not dream of being unfaithful to Richard. But hadn’t she been unfaithful to her first two husbands, too? And to her last husband? And wasn’t this perhaps only justice wreaked on her at last? Esther had been staring at Richard, and suddenly he turned and looked at her, and she saw the gay, triumphant little smile that he directed to her, as if to say: “Well, what’re you going to do about it all, my dear?” And even as she watched him, he put an arm familiarly about Frieda’s shoulder, and they both laughed heartily. Esther watched for an opportunity to speak with Richard alone, just to tell him that she wanted to talk with him upstairs as soon as the guests went home. It was a message that did not need to be delivered, but Esther felt it pressing urgently inside her to be uttered, and she knew it was because she resented Richard’s high spirits.
But Richard slipped out the door when the last group of people were leaving, and Esther heard him say to her over his shoulder, “I’m going to drive a few people home, Esther. See you in a little while.”
Frieda was among the people, Esther saw. Over an hour later, Richard had still not come home, and Esther knew he would say to her, “Oh, I stopped in the Schwarzwälder for a final drink with the Bern
sdorfs,” which would be most unlikely considering the way he had dispensed the brandy tonight. With satisfaction, Esther saw that it was a quarter to one. The woman Frieda shared her apartment with should be getting home now, and Esther hoped grimly that she might catch Frieda and Richard in an embarrassing position. But on the other hand, the woman might know of it already, Esther thought, and, being the same kind of woman as Frieda, might even condone it. That was much more likely.
Richard came in just after one and closed the front door stealthily, as if he thought she might be already asleep upstairs. When he saw her in the living room, he looked surprised.
“Why are you so late?” Esther asked. It was not at all how she had planned to begin.
“Oh, the Bernsdorfs suggested we have another drink. We stopped in a funny little bar called Die Spinne.”
“I don’t believe you. I think you were with Frieda at her house.” Richard’s face looked as blank and astonished as if he had just realized she had clairvoyant powers. “You don’t have to lie, Richard. I know it now. I would like it much better if you just admitted it, and also that you see her nearly every afternoon after work. Do you think I’m so stupid I can’t find out when your office really closes?”
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