“He simply must.”
And Greta would telephone Richardson again, giving Teddy’s latest status.
“Yes, I know,” Dr. Richardson would say. “I’ve consulted with Dr. Hightower. To be honest with you, I’m not sure there’s anything more I could do for him. We’ll just have to wait and see.”
When Carlisle drove down from Stanford to visit, he pulled Greta aside and said, “I don’t like this Hightower. Where’d he come from?” She explained that he was assigned by the sanitarium, but Carlisle interrupted her: “Maybe it’s time to bring in Richardson.”
“I’ve tried.”
“Is there anything I can do?”
She thought about this. She heard Teddy cough on the other side of the door. The wire springs of the bed trembled. There was a deep wheezing gasp for breath. “I’ll have to think about it. I’m sure there’s something, yes. I’ll just have to think about it.”
“You know how serious this is, don’t you?” Carlisle said, taking her hand.
“But Teddy’s strong,” she said.
Later that afternoon, when Carlisle had left, and the sun was sliding over the foothills, and the purply shadows were falling like blankets on the canyons of Pasadena, Greta took Teddy’s cold hand. The pulse on the underside of his wrist was faint, and at first she didn’t think it was there at all. But it tapped lightly, infrequently. “Teddy?” she said. “Teddy, can you hear me?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Does it hurt?”
“Yes.”
“Do you feel any better today?”
“No,” he said. “I’m afraid I’m worse. Worse than I’ve ever been.”
“But you’ll be getting better. Teddy? Do me a favor? I’ve called Richardson. He’s coming by in the morning. Please let him take a look at you. That’s all I’m asking. He’s a good doctor. He saved me when I was little and had the chicken pox. I had a fever of a hundred and six, and everyone, including Carlisle, had written me off, and here I am today as strong as anyone, with nothing left of that damn disease except for this little scar.”
“Greta, dear?” Teddy said, the tendons in his throat leaping. “I’m dying, dear. You know that, don’t you? I’m not going to get any better.”
And to tell the truth, she didn’t know that, not until just then. But of course he was dying; he was closer to dead than alive: his arms were thin and loose with yellowing flesh, his eyes infected, his lungs sponges so heavily soaked with blood and sputum that they would sink straight to the bottom of the Pacific. And his bones, that was the cruelest part: his bones were sopped; there was a wet living fire gnawing away at his bones. She thought of the pain he must be bearing but about which he never complained. It nearly killed her to have her husband in pain. “I’m sorry,” Teddy said.
“Whatever for?”
“For leaving you.”
“But you’re not leaving me.”
“And I’m sorry for asking you to do this,” he said.
“Do what? What are you talking about?” She felt a panicky film of sweat spread across her back. The room was warm with the effluvia of malady. She should crank open the window, she was thinking. Give poor Teddy some fresh air.
“Would you help me with it?”
“With what?” She didn’t understand him, and she thought about calling Richardson and reporting that Teddy was now speaking nonsense. An ominous sign, she knew Richardson would say, his drawl heavy on the phone line.
“Take that pillow . . . the rubber one. Put it over my face for just a little bit. It won’t take long.”
She stopped. Now she understood. A final request from her husband, whom she wanted to please more than anyone in the world. More than anything she wanted him to leave this world still in love with her, gratitude his final memory. A rubber pillow sat in the rocking chair; Teddy was trying to lift his hand to point.
“Just hold it against my face for a minute or two,” he said. “It’ll be easier that way.”
“Oh, Teddy,” she said. “I can’t. Dr. Richardson will be here in the morning. Wait until then. Let him take a look at you. He might know what’s next for you. But just hold on till then. Please stop talking about that pillow. Please stop pointing at that pillow.” The sweat was collecting at the small of her back, and on her blouse beneath her breasts. It was almost as if she had a fever, her forehead slick, a drop of sweat slipping past her ear.
She turned the window crank and felt the cool air. The pillow was black, with thick edges, and smelled like a tire. Teddy was still pointing at it. “Yes,” he said. “Bring it over here.” She touched it, its skin thick like a hot-water bottle. It was limp, only half-filled with air. “Greta, my dear . . . one last thing. Just press it against my face. I can’t take this any longer.”
She picked up the pillow and held it to her chest, the rubbery smell filling her. She couldn’t do it. Such a horrible way to die, beneath this smelly old thing, rubber the last scent of your life. Worse than what was going to kill him, she told herself, fingering the pillow’s elastic edge. Worse than anything she’d ever imagined. No, she couldn’t do it, and she threw the pillow out the window, the black pad falling like an injured raven into the Arroyo Seco below.
Teddy parted his lips, his tongue appearing. He was trying to say something, but the effort overcame him and he fell asleep.
Greta moved to his side and held her palm in front of his mouth. The breath was no stronger than the wake of a butterfly. As evening fell all around, the halls of the sanitarium became silent. The blue jays made a last dash in the ponderosa outside Teddy’s window, and Greta took his cold moist hand. She could no longer look at him, turning her head to the hand-crank window, watching the Arroyo Seco become a black pit. The San Gabriel Mountains turned into black silhouettes of something large, something black and faceless looming over the valley where the Wauds lived among the canyons and the orange groves, and where Greta was holding her breath until she thought she would pass out; and when she finally gasped for air and blotted the tears with her cuff, she dropped Teddy’s hand. Again she placed her palm beneath his nose, and then, in the night, she knew, by his own will, Teddy Cross was gone.
Part Three
Dresden, 1930
CHAPTER Nineteen
Einar’s train entered Germany. It stopped in a brown field, the turned soil silver with frost. Outside, the sun was weak in the January sky, and the birch trees rimming the field huddled against the wind. All he could see was the flat of the fields and the reach of the gray sky. There was nothing else. Nothing but a diesel tractor abandoned in winter, its red metal seat trembling on its spring.
The border patrol checked passports on the train. Einar could hear the officers in the next compartments, their boots heavy on the carpet. They spoke rapidly but they sounded bored. There was the thin whine of a woman explaining her papers, and one of the officers saying, “Nein, nein, nein.”
Two officers arrived at Einar’s compartment, and there was a flutter in his chest, as if indeed he were guilty of something. The officers were young and tall, their shoulders pressed tightly into their uniforms, which looked to Einar uncomfortably starched. Their faces were shiny beneath the beaks of their caps, as shiny as the brass buttons on their cuffs, and Einar suddenly thought that the officers, who were barely out of their youth, were made of brass themselves: all gold and shiny and cold. They had a metallic smell, too, probably a government-supplied shaving cream. One of the officers had chewed his nails to stubs, and his partner’s knuckles were scraped.
Immediately Einar felt as if the officers were disappointed with him—as if, no matter what, he was incapable of causing any trouble. The one with the raw fingernails demanded Einar’s passport; when he saw it was Danish, he became even less interested. He opened it while looking at his partner. Neither of the officers, who were breathing through their mouths, checked the information in Einar’s papers, or held up the photograph, taken so long ago in a musty-smelling photographer’s studio steps from Rundetå
rn, to compare it to Einar’s face. The officers said nothing. The first one threw the passport into Einar’s lap. The second, whose eyes narrowed in on Einar, slapped his own stomach, the brass buttons on his cuff shaking, and Einar almost expected the dong! of a bell. Then the officers were gone.
Later, the train hauled itself into speed again, and the afternoon fluttered down over the fields of Germany, where in spring rows of rape would erupt with their violent yellow blossoms and their seductive scent of the nearly dead.
The rest of the ride Einar was cold. Greta had asked him if he wanted her to join him. Einar thought he had hurt her when he said no. “But why not?” she had asked. They were in the front room of the casita, and Einar didn’t answer. It was hard for him to say, but he thought that he might not have the courage to go through with it if Greta was with him; she would have reminded him too much of their previous life. They’d been happy, he kept telling himself. Einar and Greta had been in love. If she had come along, Einar feared, he wouldn’t keep his appointment with Professor Bolk; Einar might have instead told Greta they should switch trains in Frankfurt and head south, back to Menton, where the blank sunlight and the sea could make everything seem simple. As he was saying “No, I’ll go alone,” he could almost smell the lemon trees in the park in front of the municipal casino. Or, Einar might have said he was returning to Bluetooth, where now another family lived in the farmhouse next to the sphagnum fields; he might have tried to run away, and taken Greta with him, to the room of his youth where the feather mattress had been crushed thin and needly, and the wall by his bed was scratched with line drawings of Hans and Einar asleep on a rock; where the paint on the legs of the kitchen table was picked away from when Einar would hide under there and listen to his father call to his grandmother, “Bring me more tea before I die.”
Before Einar left Paris, Carlisle had asked him if he knew what he was getting into. “Do you really know what Bolk wants to do to you?” In fact Einar didn’t know the details. He knew Bolk would transform him, but even Einar had a hard time imagining just how. A series of surgeries, he knew. The removal of his sex, which more and more had come to feel parasitically worthless, the color of a wart. “I still think you might want to see Buson instead,” Carlisle had tried. But Einar had chosen Greta’s plan; in the night, when no one was awake in the world but the two of them, when they lay quiet beneath the bedclothes, their pinkies clasped, still there was no one he trusted more.
“Let me come with you,” Greta had tried one last time, drawing his hand to her breast. “You shouldn’t have to go through this alone.”
“But I can only do it if I’m alone. Otherwise . . .” He paused. “I’ll be too ashamed.”
And so Einar traveled by himself. He could see his reflection in the window of the train. His face was pale and thin around the nose. It made him think of a hermit who hadn’t lifted his face to the window of his hovel in many years.
Lying on the seat across from Einar was a Frankfurter Zeitung, left behind by a woman traveling with an infant. In the paper was an obituary of a man who had made a fortune in cement. There was a photo, and the man looked sad in the mouth. There was something in his face—the baby fat filling his chin.
Einar sat back in the seat and watched his reflection in the window. As the evening moved in quickly, the reflection grew more shadowy and angled, so that by dusk he didn’t recognize his face in the glass. Then the reflection disappeared, and outside lay nothing but the distant twinkle of a pork village, and Einar was sitting in the dark.
They wouldn’t know where to begin with his obituary, he thought. Greta would write a draft and deliver it to the newspaper’s desk herself. Maybe that was where they would begin, the young reporters with the thinning blond hair from Nationaltidende. They would take Greta’s draft and rewrite it, running the obituary and getting it wrong.
Einar felt the train rattle beneath him, and he thought of how his obituary should begin:
He was born on a bog. A little girl born as a boy on the bog. Einar Wegener never told anyone, but his first memory was of sunlight through the eyelet in his grandmother’s summer-solstice dress. The baggy sleeves with the eyelet holes reaching into the crib to hold him, and he could recall thinking—no, not thinking, but feeling—that the white eyelet of summer would surround him forever, as if it were another necessary element: water, light, heat. He was in his christening gown. The lace, woven by his dead mother’s tatting aunts, hung down around him. It hung past his feet, and it would later remind Einar of the lace drapes that hung in the homes of Danish aristocrats; the blued cotton would fall to the baseboard and then fan onto the black-oak planks of a floor polished with beeswax by a bony maid. In the villa where Hans had been born there were drapes like that, and Baroness Axgil would snap her tongue—which was the thinnest tongue Einar had ever seen, and nearly forked—against the roof of her mouth whenever he, the girl born as a boy on the bog, moved to touch them.
The obituary would leave out that part. It would also fail to mention Einar, drunk on Tuborg, pissing into the canal the night he sold his first painting. He was a young man in Copenhagen, his tweed pants bunching up on the waist, his belt pelted with a mallet and a nail to drill another notch. He was at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts on a scholarship for boys from the country; no one expected him to paint seriously, only to learn a trick or two about framing and foreground, and then return to the bogs, where he could paint the eaves of the town halls of northern Jutland with scenes depicting the Norse god Odin. But then, on that early spring afternoon when the air was still crystallizing in his lungs, a man in a cloak stopped by the academy. The students’ paintings were hanging in the hallways, up and down the walls of the open stairwell with the white balustrade where, years later, Greta would take Einar’s head into her hands and fall in love with him. Einar’s little scene of the black bog was up, in a frame of faux gold leaf he paid for with the money he’d earned from submitting to medical experiments at the Kommunehospitalet.
The man in the cloak spoke softly, and word spread through the halls of the academy that he was a dealer from Paris. He was wearing a wide-brimmed hat trimmed with a strip of leather, and the students could barely see his eyes. There was a little blond mustache curling down around his mouth, and the faint smell of newsprint falling behind him like exhaust. The acting director of the academy, Herr Rump, who was the less talented descendant of Herr G. Rump, introduced himself to the stranger. Rump escorted the man through the academy halls, where the floors were gray and unvarnished and swept clean by orphan girls not old enough to conceive. Rump tried to halt the stranger in front of the canvases painted by his favorite pupils, the girls with the wavy hair and apple-perky breasts and the boys with the thighs like hams. But the man in the cloak, who was reported to say, although no one could ever confirm it, “I have a tongue for talent,” refused to be swayed by Herr Rump’s suggestions. The stranger nodded in front of the painting of the mouse and the cheese done by Gertrude Grubbe, a girl with eyebrows so yellow and fluffy it was as if a canary had shed two feathers across her face. He also paused by the scene depicting a woman selling a salmon painted by Sophus Brandes, a boy whose father had been murdered on a ferry to Russia, due to a single leer at the murderer’s adolescent bride. And then the man in the cloak stopped in front of Einar’s little painting of the black bog. In the painting it was night, the oaks and willows only shadows, the ground as dark and damp as oil. In the corner, next to the boulder speckled with mica, was a little white dog, asleep in the cold. Only the previous day Herr Rump had declared it “too dark for the Danish school,” and thus had given it a less-than-ideal spot on the wall, next to the closet where the orphan girls stored their hay-brooms and changed into the sleeveless apron-dresses that Herr Rump insisted they wear.
“This one is good,” the man had said, and his hand reached into his cloak and pulled out a billfold made of—again, this was rumored too—lizard leather. “What’s the artist’s name?” he asked.
“Einar Wegener,” said Herr Rump, whose face was filling with the hot bright color of choler. The stranger handed him one hundred kroner. The man in the cloak pulled the painting from the wall, and then everyone at the academy—Herr Rump and the students who had been watching from the cracks in classroom doors and the adminstratrices in their pinned-up blouses and the orphan girls who were secretly plotting a plan, which would later fail, to push Herr Rump from an academy window, and, last of all, Einar Wegener, who was standing on the stairs exactly where Greta would later kiss him—had to blink. For the whole incident was so remarkable that the entire academy blinked in concert, every last member, whether artist or not, and slightly shook its collective head. And when they all opened their eyes, the sun shifted around the spires of Copenhagen and filled the academy’s paned windows and the man in the cloak was gone.
The obituary would miss that day as well. It would also miss that one afternoon in August with Greta. It was before they were married, just after the war had ended. Greta had been back in Copenhagen only a month. She arrived at his office door at the academy wearing a straw hat pinned with dahlias, and when he opened the door she said, “Come on!” They hadn’t seen each other since she’d left for California as the war was breaking out. Einar asked, “What’s new?” and she only shrugged her shoulders and said, “Here or in California?”
She led him out of the academy, into Kongens Nytorv, where the traffic was swirling around the statue of Christian V on horseback. In front of the Royal Theatre was a German soldier missing a leg; his canvas cap was on the sidewalk, catching coins. Greta took Einar’s arm. She said, “Oh.” She left the man money, and asked his name, but the man was so shell-shocked he could not follow her.
“I didn’t realize,” Greta said as she and Einar continued walking. “It all seemed so far away in California.”
They cut through the corner of Kongens Have, where the boxhedges needed a trim and children were running away from their mothers and on the lawn young couples were lying on blankets patterned with plaid and wishing the rest of the world would go away and give them the privacy of two. Greta didn’t say where they were headed, and Einar knew not to ask. The day was bright and warm, and the windows along Kronprinsessegade were open, the summer eyelet curtains fluttering. A delivery wagon passed, and Greta took Einar’s arm. She said, “Don’t say anything.”
The Danish Girl Page 20