Flowers From Berlin (25th Anniversary Edition)

by Noel Hynd

  Stephen reached across the table and took her hand. Much in the manner of a medieval courtier, he kissed the back of it and snapped her out of her reverie.

  "A penny for your thoughts," he said.

  "I was thinking," she answered, "of how much I love you."

  FIVE

  "It's perfect," Laura said.

  "Then we'll take it," Stephen said, turning to the rental agent.

  It was the autumn of 1937, and with exactly that much discussion, Laura and Stephen rented a comfortably snug white wooden house on a shady New Haven street five minutes' walk from the Yale campus. There Stephen entered divinity school and continued his studies.

  As the semester passed, Laura and Stephen's circle of friends grew. They invited friends in for dinner, visited other couples, and went out to dinners. Hitler's occupation of the Rhineland, the civil war in Spain, and Mussolini's annexation of Ethiopia were far, far away and rarely discussed. The execution of Bruno Hauptmann for the kidnap-slaying of Charles Lindbergh's son was a topic much closer to home.

  With her husband, Laura took drives in the New England countryside on resplendent weekend afternoons, and they saw plays previewing in New Haven in advance of Broadway openings. Together they found small French and Italian restaurants in quiet corners of New Haven, and twice Stephen took Laura down to New York for the weekend.

  They behaved both like newlyweds and newly-in-loves and Stephen even took her to the Yale-Harvard football game, which sold out the Yale Bowl in November. By midway through the fourth quarter she vaguely began to understand the rules. Harvard won thirteen to six, which to a girl from Wiltshire, sounded like a pretty wild game of football.

  After Thanksgiving, Laura grew restless. Stephen was immersed in his studies and in the Christian Political Union at Yale, an extracurricular discussion and lecture group which sought, among other issues, to address a Christian response to fascism and Marxism. The Union met once a week at the outset. Then it was two evenings. Then four. Laura indulged her husband and thought it wise to find an outside activity of her own.

  At Christmas, she found one. Upon the suggestion of a faculty wife who had become a friend, Laura went for an interview at the New Haven Board of Education and applied for a job. When the all-male board heard the tones of Wiltshire in her voice, they figured she was cultured. They asked her about Shakespeare. When Laura revealed that she knew all about not just Shakespeare, but also Milton, Chaucer, and Keats, they hired her to be the fourth-grade homeroom teacher at the city’s elementary schools. American men, Laura pondered upon accepting the appointment, had a strange way of maximizing a woman's abilities.

  Meanwhile, Stephen rewrote the position papers that he had conceived for the Yale Political Union and he drafted them into magazine articles. The first one, entitled What is Christian Responsibility in 1937 he sold to Christianity Today, the prestigious publication funded by the United Lutheran Churches.

  In Stephen's article he deftly argued that the realities of the modern world limited Christian responsibility. In Spain in particular, he postulated, there was little that American Christians could or should do. In light of the fact that much of the Christian establishment in Spain supported Franco, whose army had already begun to move northward toward Madrid, the views of the conservative young theologian were not terribly surprising. It was, after all, atheistic Joe Stalin who was supporting the anti-Franco loyalists. But it was the eloquence of Stephen Fowler's argument that drew attention, eloquence combined with a thorough knowledge of history, political systems, and the scriptures.

  Other articles followed. Stephen Fowler was published in American Mercury and Harper's. Then, as he honed his conservative views more sharply, he wrote a two-part essay in The Atlantic. And at age thirty-one, Stephen Fowler was suddenly the lightning rod for a reasoned but unwavering conservative point of view within the United States.

  The America First groups contacted him, as did wealthy conservatives and Republicans. Laura, in fact, was stunned by the number of people who contacted her husband. She lost track of who they were or how many there were. Equally, the attention stupefied Stephen Fowler. All he wanted to do, he said, was continue his studies.

  Then something happened. Laura did not know what it was, because there had been nothing tangible that had caused Stephen to change. But suddenly her husband was strangely quiet and, worse, strangely remote. It lasted for weeks. Having never seen him in such a state previously, Laura did not know. Was her husband's mood a sort of concentration stemming from his work, or was it some inner turmoil? Were the demons personal or professional? When she asked him, he said nothing was wrong.

  As the weeks passed, she knew one thing. His change of moods was starting to affect the marriage. He had lost interest in sex. He never initiated anything. She had to be the, well, the aggressor. And even then, there was a preoccupation on his part. He did not take the time with her that he used to. Sometimes she was convinced that he was simply going through the motions and his passions were elsewhere. It was as if, she almost felt, his orgasm was now enough for both of them.

  All right then, Laura finally decided, we'll let it be like this for a while. When his mood changed, when the furor around his publications died away, then things would return to normal. Why wouldn't they? Stephen was still a decent man. And handsome.

  But things did not change.

  At the political union it was is if he were in mourning for some tragic bereavement of which he never spoke. He seemed to lose his voice, falling oddly mute. He offered no opinions and made only noncommittal responses. Friends—he had many—said that he was perhaps rethinking his previous positions, or maybe working on writings of a weightier sort. Laura, who knew that he had stopped writing at home, realized this was not the case. His mood continued through the spring term and into the summer. They went to Lakeside for only two weekends. "It's really for single people, you know," he said. And then in the fall he buried himself in his theological work and the Yale library. Friends spotted him roaming the stacks devouring anything that could be found on contemporary European political systems as well as twentieth-century Christian writings.

  Laura was going crazy. She wanted back the passionate lover, the vigorous virile young male, whom she had married.

  In the evening, she would undress in front of him. She would move to him in the middle of the night, letting a bare breast press snugly against him. Or in the early morning, when she felt his first stirrings, she would reach gently to him as he was half awake and take him delicately between her fingers. She would bring him to the hardness that she desired and would allow him no excuse whatsoever.

  He would oblige, naturally. But he responded mechanically. She wanted him to come after her in the way he always had before they were married, or in the way he had on their honeymoon night in the Vermont guesthouse when he had barely been patient enough to allow her to remove her dress and hadn't allowed her time to remove her stockings.

  Something was seriously wrong. Laura did not know what it was. Nor did she have anyone she could confide in or whose opinion she could reasonably seek. Stephen had been her best friend in addition to being her husband.

  One afternoon in April, midway through his final term in divinity school, Laura stood undressed before a full-length mirror and studied herself. Was she not as attractive as she had been when they married?

  This question and darker ones darted through her mind. Then Stephen entered their bedroom and stopped short.

  "What are you doing?" he asked.

  For some reason, before her husband's malignant stare, she felt like grabbing a sheet and covering herself, as if this man whom she loved and with whom she shared a bed should not see her fully unclothed in daylight.

  "Just looking," she said.

  "For what?"

  There was a pause and next she heard herself saying things she hadn't planned. "I'm trying to see why you don't find me attractive anymore."

  Stephen retrieved some papers that he had left
on his night table. "Who says I don't find you attractive?"

  "You never want to make love anymore. I practically have to force you." Now she did reach for a robe. She slid into it as he leafed through the papers.

  Then her accusation registered. He swept an imaginary hair away from his face and answered, "I'm not sure what you're talking about, Laura," he said evenly. "I've had a lot on my mind." He paused, then: "You know, Laura, I have exams coming. I can't be beholden to girlish moods and—"

  "These are not moods!" she exploded. "I'm talking about something seriously wrong between us! You are always preoccupied! And you act as if…."

  Laura fought back a stream of tears as she shouted, "You act as if making love to me is a chore!"

  "Laura, would you keep your voice down?"

  "I will not!"

  "Making love to you is not a chore."

  "You act as if it is. Eighteen months ago if you'd walked in and found me undressed, you would have grabbed me and thrown me into the bed."

  "Laura, it was new then. We've grown up a bit. We're both adults and we have professional obligations."

  She controlled herself, but her voice was breaking. "Stephen, I want to be your wife. I want you to love me. What's the matter? Why won't you tell me?" She began to cry.

  He stepped to Laura and put an arm around her. It was an arm of comfort, not fully an arm of affection.

  "Laura, I don't know what's bothering you, but we can discuss it tonight, if you wish." "You're going to your political union tonight. You won't be home till midnight. You're always going to—"

  He stole a glance at his watch and interrupted her. "I have a class in half an hour, Laura," he said. "I'm sorry. I have to go." He walked out of the bedroom and did not return until after she had gone to sleep that evening.

  The next morning Laura sat down at the dining table in the house near the Yale campus. Stephen was out already. Laura opened a box of stationery and wrote a long mournful letter to her father. She sealed it. Then she tore it up. It was only when she went to burn it that other burning letters flashed back to her. And she thought of Peter Whiteside again.

  She took another sheet of paper. On it, she wrote simply,

  Peter,

  I'm not happy.

  Laura.

  She wrote her return address on the top left corner of the envelope and she posted it airmail.

  The response arrived sixteen days later.

  Dearest Laura,

  England is beautiful in early summer. We would all cherish seeing you.

  If I may be of any help. . .

  Peter

  Laura read the letter and cried.

  Then, a few days thereafter, and just as unpredictably as ever, Stephen broke free from at least some of his invisible restraints. He began writing again, then held the floor at the political union until the early morning hours. He spoke, wrote, and lived like a man possessed.

  He had examined every bit of his philosophy, he declared, and had found it entirely lacking. Not in reason, but in compassion. In human spirit, he said, he had been entirely mistaken about many things.

  Spain, for example. Germany, for another example.

  "It is the full responsibility of any Christian," Stephen declared, first in a political forum at Yale and then in writing in The American Mercury and then— addressing different questions, of course—in The Atlantic, "to combat totalitarianism and oppression wherever it is found."

  He cited the gospels of Mark and John and the teachings of Paul. Examining his own change of spirit, his conversion, as it were, he cited his own "youthful naïveté and a muddled idea of what this world is capable of being." On his own road to Damascus, Stephen had had his own vision. It was now his contention, in complete contradiction to everything he had previously felt, "that any Christian is one of God's soldiers. As in the time of Jesus and as in the time of the Crusades, there is often a time when a moral man must bear arms and fight.

  “The Holy Land," he concluded, "takes different forms to different generations. In this century, the Holy Land may be Spain or Germany or all of Europe. God willing, the tyrants of Western Europe will not push moral men to the point where reaching for a rifle is the only act remaining for a Christian of conscience."

  "And what about you?" Laura asked Stephen when she had read his manuscript. "Are you going to pick up a rifle and go to Spain? To combat the Fascists?"

  His answer surprised her. "Perhaps," he said in the library of their home.

  "And what should I do while you're off fighting?" she asked tartly. "Wait to see if I'm a widow? Have an affair with some student or professor? Go with you?"

  "I don't know, Laura," he answered. "We're entering an era of sacrifices for the good of humanity. Maybe you should examine your own priorities. Your own sense of selfishness, perhaps."

  He had that way of always turning a discussion back against her. Selfishness! She felt wounded.

  Stephen had emerged from his trance and had reversed his political point of view almost completely. But at home, nothing changed. He was silent in the evenings. They had long since ceased to entertain their friends. And physically, well, she realized, Stephen did not seem to want her anymore. That was all there was to it.

  Gradually, it occurred to her. This was what a crumbling marriage was all about. She had to get away. She would go crazy if she did not.

  She had put money away from her teaching salary. Now she dipped a little deeper into each week's paycheck and squirreled away the extra dollar or two when she could. Laura knew exactly where she wanted to go. She knew just who she wanted to see. By mid-May, merely days before Stephen's graduation exercises, she had enough money to visit a travel agent in New Haven.

  Stephen returned home in the middle of one afternoon. In his hand he held a letter which he read and reread. He wore an expression bordering upon extreme apprehension.

  Stephen found Laura in the living room, waiting for him. She was going to speak first. But he looked up only once and then his eyes settled back to the correspondence.

  "What's that?" she inquired.

  "My appointment," he said. "The Lutheran Council is sending me to New Jersey. After my ordination, of course."

  His tone was much calmer than she had heard it in several months. "There's a little parish in a town called Liberty Circle," he said. "Northern New Jersey, I think. Ever heard of it?"

  She shook her head.

  "I haven't, either." He reread a few more lines. "I'm to assist an older minister who'll be retiring within two years. I'm to meet his parish and assume some of his duties. I presume I'll then be staying there."

  She nodded.

  "Why the long face?" he asked. He began to fold the letter. "New Jersey's not so bad. Not even so far from here, is it?"

  He tucked the letter away.

  "I'm going back to England," she said softly.

  His face paled, then flushed with an expression she had never seen before, hurt mingled with indignation and confusion. It took him several seconds to absorb her simple announcement.

  "When?" he finally said.

  "Next week."

  She said that she had tried to talk to him a thousand times but had never been successful. She said it was partly her fault, but definitely not entirely hers. She wanted breathing room, she insisted, if she couldn't be loved, instead. She wanted to see the things that remained eternal for her. England. Her father. The charming, rickety house in Salisbury which he, as a moneyed American, could probably never comprehend. But that was moving into personalities, which she did not wish to do. Throughout all this, her husband was either expressionless or slightly nodding.

  There were other things that went unsaid: all this could have been avoided if maybe once in the last few months he had whispered that he loved her. But he did not know the phrase anymore. He knew only the church and global politics. She wanted to say that she did not really want to separate from him, and she wanted Stephen to rush to her, embrace her, and cry that he did not
want this, either.

  Instead, he looked at her with growing understanding. And then the nodding was more evident.

  "It doesn't have to be permanent," she added toward the end. "But we need to put each other in perspective."

  His response stunned her. "I think it's a good idea, Laura," he finally said softly. "For both of us. I'll be honest. I've felt this way for quite some time myself. We need some time apart."

  There was little else to add. Only the details. Her ship would sail from New York the following Wednesday. She would miss his graduation. Her transit was already paid. She had purchased one-way fare and the ship was named the SS Panama.

  "I've never heard of it," Stephen said. "But you're not taking it. Not on that date."

  "And why not?"

  "You're married to me, Laura," he said. "And that means something. The least you can do, even if you're not happy here, is stay until June. We're moving to New Jersey. I can't do that without you."

  Reluctantly, she agreed.

  In the weeks that followed, Laura spent a great deal of time on small matters of organization, inventorying their possessions and spending too much time looking at the souvenirs of the days when they were happier.

  The move came in mid-June. It went smoothly. Stephen's new parish was situated in an old white church off a quiet square in a small town. Their new home, which greatly resembled the house in New Haven, was across the street. Stephen addressed his new congregation twice that month. He spoke of Christian responses to totalitarianism. The parishioners accepted him quickly. They liked him, in fact. So Laura booked passage to England again, once more on the SS Panama.

  "At least this time I've heard of it," Stephen observed.

  "I don't think that remark is funny," she snapped back. "I'm leaving you for several weeks. You don't seem to care."

  "I didn't ask you to go," he countered. Always, he had that way of turning things back upon her.