Keeper of the Mill

by Mary Anne Kelly

  She stopped at the top of the hill and took some shots of the Mill. It looked almost like a watercolor in its puddle of mist. “Nice,” she said out loud. She had loaded the camera with high-speed black and white. She was always happiest shooting black and white. Inevitably, she got carried away and finished the roll. Faintly she heard the rich sound of a man whistling. She looked this way and that. Far off to the other hill, there was somebody walking. “Who would be out at this time?” she wondered, picked up her long lens and captured him, an old fellow. It was the same walking figure she’d seen there the first day she’d arrived. Christ, was it just two days ago? It felt like two weeks had gone by.

  She shot him just for fun. She would show this one to Iris, the fond whistling man on the hill, just above the old tree she’d described there. Claire sighed. She wasn’t much looking forward to going through a mill full of clocks, as Iris had suggested. Why hadn’t she told her there would be so many clocks? She didn’t suppose anyone would hide a bag of diamonds in a tree, not for fifty-something years, they wouldn’t, but all the same she thought she’d have a look. If nothing else, she loved a big old tree.

  The hem of her long purple corduroy skirt was soaked wet by now from the high, dew-sodden grass, but she didn’t mind; she felt invigorated and alive. For no reason, she started to run.

  The gray-green world stood still around her as she swirled like an animal across the field, her camera banging at her hip. She reached the tree, out of breath and exhilarated, and put her arms around the trunk, touching the bark with the tips of her fingers, wanting nothing, wanting everything.

  There were no diamonds here. Just an elderly tree with an elephant’s memory. She laughed out loud. With her head still thrown back, she caught sight of a man from the corner of her eye. She jumped. He jumped. It was Temple Fortune.

  “Bloody hell!” he lurched and cried out.

  “Why don’t you watch your step?” she panted. Her chest heaved from the running. “You scared me. I thought you were the Whistler.”

  “The Whistler?” He looked over his shoulder. “Sounds like a Fritz Lang film.”

  “What are you doing here?” she said.

  “I might ask you the same thing.”

  She raised her chin at the scene before them. “I would use this angle if I were you,” she suggested, admiring again the view of the Mill.

  “So now you are recruiting visuals for me.” He smiled. Or was that a sneer?

  “Far be it from me.” She sneered (just in case it was) back.

  They both hesitated.

  “It’s going to rain,” she said. They were so close and breathing so heavily, she caught hold of his scent. Their eyes met with a liquid collision. They smiled daffily at each other. “Vetyver,” she concluded, recovering first, realizing where she was and that she’d run into the very one she would have hoped to; only now, his playful, exquisite presence was so physical to her that she imagined he could see right through her and read her wanton thoughts. Without another word, she ran off, away from discovery and back to the safety of the Mill.

  It was not only that she didn’t want him to know her, it was simply that she was so enjoying this rare and almost forgotten feeling of lust that she was afraid it would end if he said the wrong thing. And he must almost assuredly say the wrong thing. Who could live up to an adolescent fantasy? Who knew the script but her? It was as if she kept him at a distance, she could keep him forever, an erotic intoxication prolonged at arm’s convenient length.

  In the warm dark kitchen, Evangelika leaned over yellow egg yolks in a hollow of flour. She had one part of the long table set up with her rolling pin and a cold dish of water. A bowl of black cherries waited brilliantly.

  “Strudel?” Claire mopped her damp face with her hanky.

  The rain came down outside.

  As Evangelika didn’t answer, she walked on in.

  “May I watch?”

  “No,” Evangelika said.

  “I can pit,” Claire bargained.

  “What were you doing, snooping around out there before everyone is awake?”

  “What, me? I was taking pictures. Photographs. That’s what I do.” Abrasive old bat, she thought.

  “Ah. Another fancy one.”

  “I’m not so fancy,” Claire defended the drabness of her life. She looked at her own unmanicured and work-worn hands.

  “Sit over there, then,” Evangelika sniffed, pointing to the farthest spot from her. “Just don’t let me find out you were up in the attic looking through all those old photograph albums he had up there. I have enough to do without strangers coming in here and messing everything up.” She turned her back. “Just got things in order.”

  Claire took her stool happily. She found a knife she liked in the table drawer, a short sharp one, and got busy. The next thing she would be sure to do would be to go look through those photograph albums in the attic.

  Dying for a cup of the delicious coffee she smelled brewing on the big stove, she thought she wouldn’t press her luck. She’d get a good pile of cherries pitted before she asked. I hope he sees me like this, she caught herself wishing. Such a visual man as he was, to come across her sitting there prettily, industriously turning her fingers a ravishing beety pink, her hair silhouetted by the cheery stove.

  Father Metz stood, tired, weary, in the doorway.

  I am out of my mind, she congratulated herself. I have a husband I love and little children who need me. Well, what of it? It wasn’t as though she had done something wrong. But she had, she had done something innately wrong, and she knew it. Just as surely as though she had done something really, because these feelings were more real to her than anything she’d felt for a long, long time. She had not said “Pooh, pooh” to the excitement of Temple Fortune’s presence. She’d given every part of her being to enticing him. She had closed her eyes and prayed, “Yes, bring him closer.” She had opened her mouth and breathed, irrevocably, in. If destiny wouldn’t punish her for that, she knew herself well enough, she would do it for destiny.

  4

  So Claire spent the morning in subdued self-recrimination, purposely avoiding the film crew, instead taking the tram into Schwabing to visit her old haunt, the Café Münchener Freiheit on the Leopoldstrasse. This had been her university, after all, the classroom of her younger days. She still saw nothing wrong with having whiled away year after year discussing films, headwaiters, politics, and religion with European hotheads and moody intellectuals. It had done her good.

  She wandered down the Leopoldstrasse, then sat herself happily down at the Münchener Freiheit, its broad white umbrellaed tables smattered with regulars even in the chilly grim light. Chess players hard at work held on to their heads. Puddle lakes reflected the curlicue rooftops. An enormous plastic monkey-bars spiderweb in primary colors on the broad lawn kept children busy as their mothers sat on the sidelines, smoking, watching. This was lovely. Nothing to do but think and eat. Now where, Claire could wonder at last, would she stash a bunch of diamonds at the Mill? She could think now, away from the place. She’d been too preoccupied with Jupiter not paying her expenses. It wouldn’t hurt to order breakfast, two eggs in glass (nicely poached—not too much in either direction), a crispy Brötchen with butter and apricot jam, a small glass of tart, pulpy orange juice, and a pot of strong foamy Milchkaffee. Who needed romance, she mused, when food was such a comfort?

  “That can’t be Claire Breslinsky,” someone said.

  “Well, it is,” she replied before even looking up. She expected some long-lost eyeglasses client or model and was surprised when it turned out to be Blacky.

  “May I join you?”

  “Sure,” she said, not sure at all. Isolde’s animosity was never a remote possibility.

  “Sitting here thinking over what happened the other day, are you?”

  “Trying not to, really. Just enjoying being in this place after so many years. The main problem with living in America, as far as I’m concerned, is the lack of st
urdy bread and street cafés.”

  “Really?” He wriggled his bony bottom onto a cold seat and lit a Marlboro with a Cartier. “I’m told one must stay in SoHo when in New York. No lack of either there.”

  “Yes, well, you would want to.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Stay in SoHo. When you and Isolde marry. You’re much too grand to stay with me.” She said this jokingly, but all he said was “Oh.” He ordered a fruit-and-nut muesli from the nurse-white waitress, then thought again and added the Frühstück komplett. They lapsed into their haughty silences. Finally he said, “Well, what do you think of the scandal?”

  “I don’t know what to think,” she admitted, glad, suddenly, to have someone gossipy with whom to discuss the bad business. “I’m not too concerned about von Grünwald’s death, though. People die every day. It has nothing to do with me.” Realizing she sounded harsh, she added, “It’s very sad for the children, of course.”

  Blacky barked a laugh. “Just the opposite, I should think. Once they get used to the idea. He stood between them and everything they wanted, Hans did. He didn’t like music or art, and that’s all the two of them do like. For him it was a waste of time. Flowers. Forget flowers. Or Stella Gabriella’s primitive, dirty-looking little pots, that’s what he called them; he said she went out of her way to make them look measly. I know, because I heard him. All Hans liked was money. That was it. All his bluff hale-and-hearty didn’t do much to disguise the cold and mean behind it all. Not once you got to know him.”

  “But he must have realized that music and flowers are what elevate any mundane atmosphere to a place that would bring in more money. I mean, he seems to have known what he was doing.”

  “That was his wife, Imogene, the children’s mother. She wasn’t artistic either. Just knew how to manage Hans. Don’t know where the kids get it from. Fanatic about the church Imogene was, I think. The only thing those two had in common was their greed. Loved money. Funny how you can be that religious and still cling to money. Maybe, then again, she just wanted to be sure that her children’s futures were secure. She was small, very pale, and blond, Imogene was. Stella Gabriella favors her side physically. A tall, slender girl. They say she chose Hans because he was the only one in the village taller than her. They didn’t get along. She was always picking away at him. Of course, he had his side of the story, too. Hans once told me the only thing he could ever do right, in his wife’s eyes, was bring in money. Imagine feeling that way! No wonder he was so greedy. Then there were other problems. You know that Cosimo is insane.”

  “Honestly? Certifiably insane?”

  “Bonkers.”

  “Gee. I knew he was troubled. Anyone can see that. But he shows such genius, doesn’t he? Everything he does is so superior to other people’s ways of doing things. I mean, the way he plays. And then the way he’s done the gardens. It’s ingenious.”

  “Some would say obsessive.”

  “Oh, come on. You of all people should appreciate the nearness of obsessiveness to great art.”

  “Oh, it’s a great art now, is it?”

  She put her napkin down. “What is it with you Europeans—art isn’t great unless it’s dead and in a book or on a wall?”

  He laughed happily. “One forgets the sheer naive directness of the American until one comes bumper-to-bumper with it.” His muesli arrived and he dug right in. “It does one good,” he said with his mouth full.

  “Good.” She shrugged, returning to her own breakfast, really liking him for the first time in a while. He had a sort of patriarchal tenderness that only bloomed when you insulted him, but one would have to do it justly. He was scrupulously clean. Scrubbed pink and shiny from his leonine dome to his brightly polished, well-kept and elderly cordovan shoes.

  “Did you know Temple Fortune before this?” Claire asked, trying her best to sound merely conversational.

  “No. Well, I’d heard of him, of course. But Puffin is the power behind the throne. He’s the one with all the connections. Temple Fortune is just the talent. They just hit it right as a team, those two. Temple Fortune might be dressed up and preened and pruned, but he was just a down-and-out Irish immigrant filmmaker—slash—musician when he met Puffin. Jack-of-all-trades, master of none. Rock and the inevitable Roll, if I remember the story correctly. Course that was a long time ago. As good a way out of the ghetto as any, I suppose. It was that or the IRA. And we know where that will get you. No, Puffin Hedges is the one you want to know.”

  Maybe you, Claire thought. “It’s rough about your wedding on the seventeenth,” she changed the subject. “Bad luck, eh?”

  “Don’t worry about Isolde,” Blacky snorted. “She’ll turn it around to her own advantage.”

  “If anyone can, she will,” Claire agreed. “Tell me, why did she decide to marry you?”

  “Good move. Nothing better she could do at this point. Who wants an old diva?” He leered at her, as if to say, You see how horrid I still am, heh, heh.

  “Phh. She’s not old.”

  “For a diva she is. What does one do as a diva after one’s prime?”

  Claire looked more closely at this Blacky fellow from her past. Never had she heard Isolde criticized so disrespectfully. Still, she was sure that flippant tone would be subdued if Isolde were around.

  “Surely not open a bistro,” he continued, “much more fun to be a society hostess. Say,” he added mockingly, “didn’t you and I used to have fun?”

  “Yes, we did. Now we’re quite good friends. Don’t tell me you’re one of those fossils who believe men and women can’t be friends!”

  “They can as long as the one not wanted doesn’t make a fool of him or herself and blow the facade.”

  Was he warning her? “Well, that’s not the case with you and me,” she assured him. “At least our break was civilized and by mutual consent.” Claire sniffed and mopped her mouth with the heavy pink napkin, remembering in a flash the angry words and melodramatic scenes that had shocked even her. Oh well. “What’s the story with the beautiful Stella Gabriella?” she asked.

  “Beautiful is right,” Blacky sighed. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone more beautiful, have you?”

  “No, now you mention it, no.”

  “The funny thing is, though, I’ve never wanted to sleep with her, as knockout as she is.”

  “Hm.” Claire would never cease to be amazed at men’s unfathomable vanity—as though such a possibility would ever present itself! “Well, she is rather young,” Claire said kindly.

  “What I mean is”—Blacky rolled his fists and drummed the table with a frightening clobber—“she makes me horny as hell, but not to sleep with her. Do you get what I mean?”

  “Jesus. You’re not coming on to me, are you?” She pretended to be shocked.

  “Well, no.”

  Claire laughed.

  “What I mean is”—he patted his nubby fingertips together—“she provides this atmosphere of spiritual passion. A sort of plane of otherworldliness. Well, it just fills me with guile, lust.”

  Claire thought of Temple Fortune’s hungry eyes. The way he’d looked at her. Taunting and wicked, as though he would eat her from her innocent plate.

  “I know what you mean, I think. All that goodness fills you with mischief. Makes you feel wicked.”

  “Genau. Exactly.”

  “Now who’s older? Stella or Cosimo?”

  “Oh, Stella. He’ll do anything she tells him.”

  “So do you think she’ll keep the Mill as it is, or—”

  “Convert it into a potter’s haven for her potter friends?”

  “You must admit it wouldn’t be a bad idea.”

  “Mmm. The thought has possibilities. But there’s no main force there to get it going. Just these two balmy kids who’ve never had to earn their livings. I could see the whole place going to seed. I mean, Stella might be the most beloved potter in Bavaria. What is it they call her, ‘Ludwig’s national treasure’? But even a national tre
asure needs tourists to pay the gas and electric. She doesn’t strike me as the type who’d know how to engender business.”

  “No, you’re right. That melodrama with her hair was indicative of, I don’t know, instability.”

  “It was downright weird.”

  “Yeah, weird unless it was, you know, sort of a symbolic setting-free some people go through when a parent dies.”

  “But as eccentric as those two may be, they’re not stupid. I can’t see them giving the place up.”

  “Well, no. It is their home.”

  “They’ve always lived there?”

  “Yes, and think of the treasure.”

  Claire went white. “What treasure?”

  “There’s a treasure hidden in the Mill. Didn’t you hear them the other day?”

  “But surely that’s rumor. Gossip.”

  “That’s not what Isolde thinks.”

  “Really? When did she tell you about the treasure?”

  “Christ, woman, you were sitting there with us.”

  “Yeah, but I was distracted.”

  They remembered Hans von Grünwald’s cold, dead body lying on the kitchen table, and they both shook their heads sadly, sobered by the enormity of death.

  “One thing doesn’t figure,” Claire pursued. “If Hans was such a tightwad, wouldn’t it follow that he’d encourage Stella’s pottery? Seeing as she’s so good at it. And already recognized, as you say. It must be bringing in money. She must get some sort of grant or something. Doesn’t she?”

  Blacky pursed his merry lips. “Money is one thing. Lots of money is another. You know yourself, being recognized as good doesn’t guarantee financial success. Now marriage, on the other hand, and to the right person …”

  “Do you mean Hans wanted to marry his daughter off to someone rich?”

  “Rich and noble.”

  “Who?”