§ § §
A triple triumphal arch crossed Congress Avenue and Pecan Street. That evening, a torchlight parade was scheduled to snake through it and along Austin’s downtown streets
Prior to the concert, a grand banquet was to be served at Saengerrunde Hall – known also as Scholz’s Garten, the oldest continually operated tavern in Texas.
Hot-air balloon ascensions, marching bands, and military drill teams, plus bowling and other games and amusements were scheduled around the garden’s bubbling spring.
Gideon pulled out his brass pocket watch. He sorely missed his Meisterstück. Gone – thanks to Romy’s derring-do. Twenty minutes of six.
Where the hell was she?
And where was Irina? Had she successfully evaded the SS?
“Do not worry yourself so,” Miriam said. “Romy Sonnenschein is a grown girl and can take care of herself, I assure you. You preoccupy yourself far too much with the refugee.” Reassuringly, she patted his sleeve, her forearm linked with his as they strolled Scholz’s gardens.
Miriam, of course, was right. Why should he be so preoccupied with the Gypsy scammer? True, Romy was out of the ordinary. But were not all con artists? He should know.
He and Miriam wandered beyond the bubbling spring and fountains to the menagerie with bears, deer, alligators and parrots. The two outdoor stages for concerts and plays were in sight just beyond, and the picnic tables, positioned beneath shade trees, were already packed.
Long lines had formed at the two buffet tables. Scholz’s was legendary for its roast beef, jellied fish, herring salad, chili, and every other kind of dish imaginable – plus its desserts. Today, all for .75 cents.
He staked out one of the last vacant tables. “Wait here,” he told Miriam, “and I will get us beer and a platter of food.”
She gave him a heartwarming smile. “I’ll be waiting for you, as always, Gideon.”
He was one lucky man. Miriam was giving and reassuring and dependable. As organized as she was, she was on top of everything. Better than any military commander. Not a needy woman, like Lavinia had been, Miriam provided a loving touch. Best, she had his back.
By contrast, Romy possessed none of those attributes. Where the hell was she? He had put his professional reputation on the line to finalize this gig for the Gypsy scamp.
“There ye be,” came Romy’s voice, a genie summoned by rubbing a lamp. And having her back was the towering McClellan.
Gideon nodded up at him, then barked at Romy, “You have five minutes to check in at Stage Two!”
She flashed him that megawatt grin. “Got it, Gideon Goldman.” And then she and the tall Texan were swallowed up by the influx of the evening’s spectators.
He was chagrinned by her lackadaisical approach to life, but should he have expected anything different?
However, her performance that evening was anything but lackadaisical. Passionate, powerful, vibrant. Delivered with unimaginable fire and vitality.
Now he could understand why Romani were celebrated for their musical heritage. They had influenced jazz, bolero, flamenco music, even classical composers like Franz Liszt. Most likely, the next day the Austin Daily Statesman would dutifully report on Romy Sonnenschein’s great technique, flair, and progression of her performance.
What a loss; they would know nothing about the wild, vagabond spirit behind it all.
§ § §
Romy finished her performance with her signature song, “Lost in Your Smile”, to thunderous applause.
Stashing Arturo’s borrowed guitar in its banged-up case – she really needed to save enough money to buy her own guitar – her cheap jewelry tinkled out her fraud. Gypsies loved opulence. And she flaunted it, because that was what was expected of her.
She groped her way offstage, behind the curtains. But where she would have descended the three-step staircase, Moe blocked her way. Was it fate that he invariably turned up at the gateway between heaven and hell? As below, so above?
Stubby arms folded across his barrel chest, he said, “Well, now, why did I not receive a gold-scripted invitation to your performance tonight?”
Her grip on the case handle tightened. She drew a steadying breath. “Moe, I told ye I canna help ye. Ye have more ready access to him than I do, what with your Jewish Relief work here in Austin.”
His mouth, large in proportion to the rest of his body, stretched like a rubber band about to snap close. “It’s not about helping me. It’s about helping yourself. A kapo at Sachsenhausen has suddenly recalled where he saw you before.”
She refused to let him see her quake. “Tis sure I am his memory was joggled by yuir miserable self.”
His rubber-band mouth stretched wider. “Now that Colonel Klauffen knows you are alive, he would naturally be interested in your brother – and you – again. You know, interrogations, examinations, inquisitions, those kinds of things.”
Her skin shriveled. German spy rings were known to be operating in the States, and the radio had recently announced German saboteurs had been apprehended before they could explode a bomb on Niagara Falls.
Her Gypsy folk lived according to the unwritten rules of the road. Knew to avoid rats. Knew to wash your hand before you ate. Knew not to take the last piece of pie. Knew that pearls and gold must be real.
Her clan knew the law of the land. Knew not to make eye contact with the Nazis. Knew that the wealthy made the laws. Knew that those laws did not protect people like her, living in poverty.
Her clan also knew that bride kidnapping, whether in Ireland or Czechoslovakia, was a good way to avoid a bride price. Knew that virginity was essential to an unmarried woman.
So, she knew, given her virginal status or lack thereof, that she could not depend upon Duke for protection. And it was a given that she could not depend upon the law. Any law. Anywhere. It all came down to class distinction.
Thus, she summoned her skimpy courage and focused her meanest hypnotic glare on the little man. “What swampy muck did ye worm yuir way out of, Moishe Klein?”
At her use of his real name, his troll’s face reddened. “Soon, maybe a matter of months, Hitler’ll snap close his mouse trap – and I will, too.”
At the bottom of the stairs, just behind Moe, appeared Duke’s formidable frame. “Keller, isn’t it? Moe Keller. Not sure what that threat you just made is about, but harm her in any way, and I’ll stomp a mudhole in your misshapen self.”
Moe bristled like a porcupine, but Duke elbowed him aside and offered her a hand of assistance to descend the three steps.
Three steps that might make a difference of a lifetime. Ignoring Moe’s belligerent countenance, she placed her palm in the tentative safety of Duke’s engulfing one.
Without sounding jolly ridiculous, the air seemed charged with something she had never felt anywhere else. How they reached his pickup, which took a goodly fifteen minutes of threading through the crowd that surged around them, like water around a boulder, and next wending through the parked vehicles – including everything from jalopies to flatbed wagons to bicycles – she never could recollect.
What she was distinctly aware of was the shocking electrical current flashing in the dark around her and Duke, like a multitude of fireflies. He opened the pickup’s door, and his hand at her elbow, boosting her up inside, created an explosion of molecules, atoms, and universes.
If there existed any romantic inclination about her, it insisted that this extraordinary sensation was a result of the combustible union of their energy, resulting from that unforgettable night of surprising yearning, of the soul’s straining, to connect beyond mere copulation.
But then a belief in romance and courtly love and happy-ever-after fairy tales had never been her strong suit. Practical demands always interfered.
As if negotiating Austin’s heavy traffic on Saturday nights on Sixth Street demanded his full attention, Duke said nothing.
And neither did she, not when the air in the rattletrap Ford was heavy with her wanting. A w
anting bankrupted by so many things that would never be said. Important things. Like, I have never felt like this before. Like, Tis splintering I am when you come into the room. When me stomach crashes, and me knees falter. These feelings take me by surprise. Do you feel them, too?
Once on the highway back to the S&S, the mortar-like set to his squared-off jaw indicated he was not in the mood for her usual repartee.
At last, just past the S&S wrought-iron, arched entryway, he eased back somewhat into the dirty gray wool seat and glanced over at her. “Wanna tell me what happened back there, between you and that damned dwarf?”
Looking anywhere but at him, she fiddled with her purse clasp. “As they say in those mob movies, Moe’s got the goods on me.”
“Because you entered the U.S. on false papers? Because you are not Jewish? Or did you break other laws back in Germany, as well?”
Despite the moonlight, it was too dark to see the grassy fields and tree leaves and crops that were shooting from the earth that spring, but she knew they were a youthful pale green. While she felt very old.
“Back in Germany, I have a brother. The Nazi doctors were elated when we two were swooped up from a street performance. Not only were we Gypsies, we were twins. Fifteen-years-olds. And Luca was gay. What better experimental subjects?”
“Jesus Christ!” He brought the pickup to a stop in front of the barn. Switching shut the ignition, he shifted his lengthy frame on the bench seat so that they faced off. “Go ahead.”
“Ye see, all the ghouls’ notes and preliminary examinations and interviews were blown to bits when I escaped after that first experiment, leaving them with only me brother. And, of course, they would be delighted if I were to be returned to Sachsenhausen’s labs. Moe was one of their stoolies – he remembers me from there.”
She slid him a sidewise glance. She dreaded what other questions, personal questions as probing as surgical instruments, he might ask.
He didn’t. He lapped a hand around the back of her neck and the other around her waist and hauled her across the split upholstered seat onto his lap.
Trapped between his chest and the steering wheel, she buried her face in the cradle of his neck and wide shoulder. “I willna let ye make me cry again, Duke McClellan,” she mumbled.
“Hell, sweetheart, I’ll cry for you if you want me to.”
Giving that some thought, she said, “I think I’d rather ye kiss me.”
“Asking for trouble again, are you?” His next words rumbled out like summer thunder, concealing that slight speech impediment that occurred when he was on unfamiliar ground. “You have to know that if you have it in your head to stay on at the S&S, Sunshine, I can’t help but try to cover you.”
Her heart was jangling like a tambourine. She had a solid idea of what he meant by covering, in the breeding sense of the word. But for her, cover, his covering, meant his large body sheltering hers, protecting her from all harm. To hold her and to hide her. Her body guard. Always beside her. If only.
“Aye.” That one-word acquiescence yielded to whatever he was asking of her.
He tucked his jaw in order to look down at her, his gaze locking on hers. “Are you safe? You know what I mean. Are you in the breeding time?”
At that, she laughed. Laughter that scoffed at her, him, the whole crazy world. “Ye dunna want any Gypsy-tainted bastards running around, do ye now? Oh, I am bloody well safe. As a start, the Nazis sterilized me female parts. Like an old woman drying up these past five years, me monthlies are . . . well, months and months go by . . . . ”
She left off, not adding that there was nothing to indicate she was a nubile woman except the occasional spotting and that pervasive wetness generated by this raging craving for him.
In the near dark, his eyes flared. Then they narrowed, scoring her features intently, one by one, as if studying tracks for clues as to what kind of critter had made them and when. But his words were infinitely gentle. “Now’s not the time to hold back, Romy. How did it happen, this . . . ,” his voice thickened, “ . . . this sterilization?”
She counterfeited a shrug of nonchalance but bit her lower lip to stop its trembling. Her words came out rather garbled. “The doctors, they make ye stand between their two x-ray machines. Me innards burned terribly afterwards. Luca, me brother, had it worse. They removed his bollocks.”
“God Awmighty,” he muttered.
Her face cracked with a fallacious grin. “Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals . . . we were not of the master race, ye see.”
Strangely, it hadn’t been the outrageous acts of the Nazi inhumanity but the rest of humanity’s silence she continued to find outrageous.
Oh, God, what if she went weak and blubbered again? Time for the stiff upper lip and all. Criminy, she had been doing that her whole life; she could do it now. “There isna a day that passes that I dunna feel guilt. Guilt that I escaped after that first time – and Luca dinna.”
His large hands framed her face, forcing her defiant eyes to meet his smoky ones. “Listen to me, Romy. If you want to stay on at the S&S, I’ll make sure you’re safe from people like Moe and Nazi doctors, if I have to build a goddamn wall to keep the world out”
She couldn’t hide the sadness from her smile. “But not safe from yuirself?”
He stared at her for a long moment, at her eyes, her mouth, then her eyes again. He shook his head, as if to clear it. “If that’s what you want. Yes, myself included.”
This time her grin was genuine, and she cooed softly in her best Judy Garland voice, “’Gimme, gimme, what I cry for. Ye know ye got the kind of lovin’ I’d die for.’”
“You’re one of a kind, Sunshine,” he said, shaking his head, but she had coaxed a smile from him.
So intent he appeared to be on achieving his goals for the S&S and all that they entailed, including a wife and bairns, that it seemed to her he rarely allowed himself the luxury of a smile; but, Sweet Baby Jesus, when he did, that slow smile that began with the slight tilt to the ends of his mustache – well, he could drop a lass in her tracks.
Best of all, though, when he smiled like that, it made up for all the words he didn’t say, all the words she wanted to hear.
Well, almost, made up for their lack, but she would take whatever crumbs he offered.
§ CHAPTER SIXTEEN §
She was living in mortal sin.
All because she was, hungering after a two-bit cowboy. Nay, she was only trying to make less of the man, so as her future hurt would be less. Duke McClellan was more male than all the men she had ever taken on, and that included Nazi doctors.
Spring cleaning had rolled around, and Romy tackled the grime and dirt, a task which was not normally a prerequisite for her housekeeping standards.
Keeping the house clean was a constant battle against the dust and sand that spring winds swept determinedly beneath doors and window sills. Once again, she requisitioned Bud’s tennis racquet to attack the dirt and dried mud that had burred into the parlor’s braided rug since last fall. Beating out the dirt was also an excellent method of beating out her frustration.
It was not like she didn’t have other options. According to Gideon, if she pursued a career in the music field, the world could be her oyster. But she hadn’t won the grand prize of a performance at the Millet Opera House.
Reflecting on this, she swatted the rug time and again, her face turned from the flurrying dust. She reminded herself, or, perhaps, rationalized, that a famous flamenco guitar player would be a repeat of what she had been – that of an organ-grinder’s monkey, only performing on a more majestic scale.
Blimey, she could always tell fortunes, if worse came to worst.
Nay, what she wanted was . . . she wanted to watch the gloaming through Ireland’s magical mist, surrounded by Eire’s blinding green. She wanted peace of heart . . . and a grand love affair. Not settling as a runner up.
She wanted a family . . . and children. All of which would never be, could never be, hers.
It was
not in her cards.
Sure and begorra, she might be able to use her intuition and common sense when reading the cards for others, but whatever gods may be had not granted those gifts for her own personal use. They must have considered it would be giving her an unfair advantage.
Still . . . why did the Emperor, the Magician, and the High Priestess continue to turn up in their various interpretations in her own card layouts? Was it truly possible the cards, the spirits, were trying to tell her something?
If she had learned anything about herself, if she wanted anything, she knew it was never to be separated from those she loved . . . but even if it meant that same dueling of hearts that was her parents’ tormented way of loving? An intense loving that became a duel to the death, if only in the sense of a love-sick heart slowly dying?
She did know she had come to terms with the desolating fact that she was the only person she could count on.
Which meant, when reflecting upon the nights she now spent spooning with Duke in his bed, required a great deal of mental surgery. Aye, the way he touched her, held her, coaxed her, the way he bit her earlobe that equaled an intensely pleasant sensation, the way he gave his self over to her, his flaring, blue eyes betraying in that climatic moment a soul-deep way of loving . . . .
It was as close to paradise as she was likely to come, outside of Ireland – because those were the nights, but with the dawning of each day, he treated her with a formal, almost courtly reserve, a chivalrous decorum, when in front of the ranch hands. Holy Mother, even Helen Keller could see the sizzling between her and Duke. The men had to know.
And, thus, come the stroke of each dawning, Cinderella turned into ordinary pumpkin pie, alas. Each succeeding morning, she would get out her mental scalpel and excise that portion of her nighttime recollections of a fiery and dominant lover who, at times, could be unaccountably gentle and even playful.
Like the night before, when, fascinated by her tiny toes and, light of heart, he had played “This Little Piggy”, tweaking her toes and making her laugh so hard she was pleading with him to stop.
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