Keeper of the Mill

by Mary Anne Kelly

  “Yes, well, I think it’s more difficult for men to accept that sort of thing.” She sounded defensive.

  “You mean your mother wouldn’t be as upset?”

  “Men have a naive way of believing in the physical, the tactical plane as the only reality. Women realize the futility of accumulation.” Claire thought that was naive. It’s women, after all, who make shopping a life work. “My mother was my dearest friend,” Stella continued. “She knew what my vocation was. Even helped me to see it.” Stella craned her neck to straighten her spine. “She is never far from me, my mother. She knew I always wanted the religious life, doing for people. You see, my mother was, shall we say, delicate. She wasn’t worldly.”

  Claire remembered someone calling her simpleminded. No, that had been the grandmother. Adam’s wife—Adam’s wife was supposed to have been simpleminded. Hans’s mother.

  “So how will it go? Is there a waiting period, to see if you like it?”

  “What happens first is a physical and mental evaluation. The convent wants to be sure you are coming to something rather than away from. Then there is a mental aptitude test and an interview by Council.”

  “And then?”

  “Well, there are two years in the Novitiate. The first year is the Postulancy. In the second year one is a Canonical Novice. After the Canonical year, you take temporary vows. These are renewed each year until final profession. Usually six to eight years after you enter.”

  “And your mother wanted you to do this?”

  “No, she didn’t want me to … but when I confided to her my vocation, she was … how shall I say? Joyous. She was joyous.”

  “She wasn’t saddened that you would never have a family?”

  “Oh, but I shall have a large and wonderful family.” She smiled pointedly.

  Claire nodded. “Stella? May I ask you a personal question?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did your mother love your father?”

  “Oh, I’m sure she loved him. Especially when they were young. Only later, as I grew older, I felt her shrink from him. He was not religious. My mother, very.” Stella held her elbows and raised her shoulders up.

  “Oh.” Claire strained her eyes to see how far up the others had gone. A local resident, his house along the road, had rigged up an ice cream counter behind the clematis vine and was selling ice cream. There was only one flavor left, strawberry. Claire bought them each a cone, wondering as she did why, oh why, noblesse never failed to oblige.

  “Delicious,” Claire slurped, aware of her sloppy gluttony compared to Stella’s refined, catlike licks. “If you go into the convent—”

  “When I go into the Novitiate. It’s quite settled.”

  “Yes, when you go in. Sorry, I didn’t know it was definite.”

  “Mother Superior has accepted me into the Novitiate. Finally.” She glanced quickly at Claire. “The same day my father fell, actually.”

  “What—you mean, your father knew you were accepted before he fell?”

  “No, I hadn’t received my mail until after. It was just as well. He was so against my entering that had he known, I might have attributed his fall to his anger. His being upset. I wouldn’t want to have that on my conscience.”

  “Yes, I see what you mean.” She noticed Stella’s ladylike nibbles had progressed to a more uncharacteristic kidlike slurping.

  “What will happen to the Mill? I mean, who will run it, now your father’s gone?”

  Stella licked her fingers with this new abandon. “That,” she finally said, “is something I don’t know.” She stopped walking again, adjusted her basket, held her flat belly with her palms, composed herself, taking a deep breath and then another. “I only know it won’t be me.”

  She talked, Claire thought, not disapprovingly, like a recovering AA member. “Stella, what was it you meant when you said, ‘Es war Cosimo,’ ‘It was Cosimo,’ what did that mean?”

  Stella dropped her pale lashes. “I was upset,” she said.

  “Yes, but what did you mean?”

  She looked defiantly at Claire. “He told me to—”

  Just then, before she could say, she stopped. “Ah,” she said, “Doktor von Osterwald!”

  “Where?”

  “There.” Too polite to point, Stella raised her chin in the direction of a tree bent low to a ninety-degree angle where a gathering listened to a calliope player. Blacky hadn’t seen them yet. Claire experienced the old feeling of safety whenever he was around. “You’ll never die when I’m around,” he used to promise her. “I won’t let you,” he would say, and she’d loved that. What better way to feel with someone than immortal? She still loved him for his blasphemous bravado. There was no one more self-secure than Blacky. Which was why, she supposed, women literally flocked to him. Even now he was surrounded by a group of women. And why, years ago, she had admitted to herself, she couldn’t bear to share his life. Blacky wore the simple, elegant sports jacket of the German professional. Claire pushed her lower lip stubbornly out and walked toward him. She was long past thinking the problem was with her or him. They were who they were. Blacky was, simply, a phenomenon, and that was that. Her life was certainly more magnificent for having known him.

  “Hello.” She grinned.

  “Hello.” He pushed his gleaming glasses upon his nose in a characteristic movement.

  Stella left them to go talk to some devoted-looking potters in the main tent, after promising to meet them later at Aidenried.

  Blacky and Claire strolled together through the marketplace. Claire had to restrain herself from lusting after all these magnificent pots and pieces of Töpferei. She didn’t have to worry about buying anything exorbitant, she was on too tight a budget for that. But it was hard not to go nuts. And she would have to bring back souvenirs. In the end she chose some small, inexpensive, plain clay bells on long straw cords. They delighted her. They simply would, after all, persevere. She had one for each of her family and one for Iris. Then, oh well, one more for Mohammed at the newsstand. There was one odd-shaped one at the back, rejected by the avenue of tourists and restricted to the corner. She picked it up by its delicate cord. There was something decidedly Oriental about this one. Balanced but off-center. “Ich nehme dieses auch,” she informed the redheaded lady wrapping her lot, picturing it hanging outside her kitchen window, glistening with rain or sunshine, reminding her forever of this moment.

  Blacky battled her hand and paid the woman, exasperating Claire. She didn’t mind really. She was relieved.

  “Happy?” Blacky inquired as they trotted away with her package.

  She nodded.

  “You always did like little acquisitions.” He shook his head wonderingly. “It was the big ones that bothered you.”

  She stopped walking. “What does that mean?”

  “What? It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just an out-loud observation.”

  “Hmmm. If I say it sounds demeaning, you’ll say I’m indulging in paranoidism.”

  “Such an easy street of escape.”

  “A street I fear we’ve walked along before.”

  They looked at each other. “Let’s stop,” he said, stopping. “Shall we sit here?”

  “All right.”

  He leaned across and inspected her face. Other people peered deeply into your eyes. Blacky scanned your face and skin tone for his reading of you.

  She laughed. “Do you remember McLeod Gange, the Himalayan village where the Tibetan refugee camp was, where the Dalai Lama’s private doctor would take stool and urine samples for a quick diagnosis? And his tools of research were his eyes and nose?”

  “Yes.”

  “You remind me of him more and more.”

  “He was a splendid diagnostician,” Blacky reflected, pleased by the comparison. “So! You seem to have held up pretty well, despite everything.”

  “‘Everything,’ I suspect, means my marrying Johnny.”

  “If that’s what you consider any upsetment in your life …�
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  “It’s what I think you think is upsetting… I think it was very broad-minded and generous of Johnny to allow me coming here. I mean, after all, you are my ex. How many men let their wives go traipsing halfway around the world without them?”

  Blacky stretched. “At this point, what’s the difference?”

  Claire laughed. “You got that right.”

  “There is that small droop here.” He traced the skin below the side of her mouth. “I could do a quick tuck right here”—he pulled the skin taut beside her ear—“take off ten years in ten minutes.”

  “Jesus, Blacky, I earned those ten years. Do you mind?”

  “What about work, Claire?” He frowned, concerned. “Why haven’t you been working?” Good old Blacky. If he didn’t get her one way, he’d get her the other. They both knew her body of work in Germany had been like paintings by Spitzweg, Germany’s Norman Rockwell. Golden-yellow and idealized. She’d always portrayed them as they’d wished to be portrayed, her Germans, down a pre-Disney cobbled alley, up a pretty Berchtesgaden ski lift. A resurrected German, cleansed by his father’s war of organized and brutal corruption. No smug and hideous skyscrapers of greed snagged her vista of Alpine wonderland. No, they were purified and gemütlich—cozy—antique, successful, harmless. They sat at the same hand-embroidered tablecloth of blind placidity she had imagined she’d despised. How she had successfully managed to avoid the modern, more intricate reality was beyond even her and a tribute, she knew, to her trusty escape mechanisms. And she was still turning over in her mind what he’d said about… at this point, what was the difference? What the hell was that supposed to mean? She was no longer in the running? Is that what he thought? Well, if she wasn’t, that was a pretty insensitive thing to say. How was she supposed to feel? No wonder she had left him. “I am working,” she said finally, sullenly. “I just did some promising stuff around the Mill. Beautiful, I think.” She remembered the solitary figure, the man wandering through her pictures. She would be interested to develop those and see how they turned out.

  “Oh, landscape. But what about people? It’s people you do so well.”

  “I was rather hoping to get that at the wedding.” She looked emphatically at him.

  “And I’m sure you will.” He patted his knees impatiently. “But that’s all society stuff to a photographer of your girth. I was thinking more of political subjects. Real stuff.”

  Claire sighed the same weary sigh she had always sighed with him. Blacky had repeatedly tried to get her to do war-torn images, and she had always fought him. She was terrified of being shot or blown up. He, on the other hand, loved a good war and vacationed often on the outskirts of any battlefield, dropping in at the local hospital to contribute his skills. He really enjoyed that. I am not a photojournalist, Claire had argued seven thousand times. “I’m not a photojournalist,” she said again this time.

  “So instead you’re a housewife in Queens,” he said.

  “A homemaker! A homemaker in Queens who is not a photojournalist.”

  “Yes, but you would be such a good one,” Blacky insisted.

  “But I don’t want to be a photojournalist!” she shrieked, turning heads.

  Claire had always been a little theatrical at heart. Blacky combed an unhurried hand through his hedge of hair. He gazed out into the sunlit stalls and people talking. His face had taken on a well-bred pinched and long-suffering expression. A young man with a cleanly shaven head had set up a stall and was harassing passersby with the idea of deporting foreigners as a solution to the German’s woes. He was quite humorless, and his presence cast a bleak draftiness on the scene.

  “These are bad times in Germany,” Blacky said.

  “Not for you, though.”

  Blacky looked at her over the tops of his glasses. “Ach. That was beneath you.”

  “Oh, you’re right,” she agreed. “I’m sorry. I’m probably just jealous that you’re rich and I’m not.”

  “You could have been.” He turned away.

  “Oh, don’t go giving me that poor you-deserted-me routine.” She eyed him shrewdly. “You left me long before I left you.”

  “I never would have left you,” he choked.

  “Yeah, right. What about that French girl in India? What was that? Remember?” Claire saw again the indigo silk blouse that spectacular girl had worn. She felt her lips tighten in savage jealousy. “You wanted her to come along with us in our van! Our van!!” She pounded her still-outraged chest. She cleared her throat, calming herself. “I was never enough for you.”

  “She had a lump!” Blacky sputtered.

  “Oh, they all had lumps! There were plenty of ugly girls with lumps. I don’t remember you bothering about any of them.”

  “Ja.” He nodded his head approvingly, remembering too. “She was unfortunately not bad. There was something irresistibly devilish about her.”

  Claire laughed. He had Isolde now. That should take care of that. Blacky wasn’t only plastic surgeon to the photomodels and society ladies. His main work, as he saw it, was reconstruction of breast-cancer patients. You couldn’t fault him for that. And any disloyalty to her had always been merely physical. There had never been, before or since, anyone who’d so staunchly understood and defended her creativity. He’d never thought her aim should be financial, as Johnny did. He thought it was enough that she be good.

  “Dear Blacky.” She reached across and covered his hand with hers. “I really am so happy to see you.”

  “Very pretty!” Isolde, perfectly timed, marched toward them.

  Claire took her hand back. Only not so swiftly as Isolde would have liked.

  “Hallo, Liebling.” Blacky stood and gathered Isolde’s elbows into his hands. She let him kiss her cheek, then glared at Claire.

  “You’ve been busy, I see,” Isolde said to her, eyeing her package and meaning something else.

  Claire threw up her arms and sighed. She kissed the fuming air beside Isolde’s cheeks. “We were just talking about old times,” she said.

  “How nice.” Isolde snapped her compact open and shut, taking in, in that moment of glittering reflection, the magnificence of herself in anger. Consoled, she collapsed on the bench. “I want that Gaudí-like vase at the end of the tent row,” she commanded. “Do you want to go look at it?”

  “Isolde, whatever you want is fine with me. You know that.”

  Isolde and Claire looked at him. It was really true. She could have whatever she wanted. They looked at each other. Subdued, Isolde said, “I think I’ll just go buy it, then.”

  “Yes, do, Liebling,” Blacky said. “Then come right back here. We’ll wait. Have them send it. Tell them to send it to the Mill.”

  They watched her sashay importantly off.

  “Why send it to the Mill?” Claire asked.

  “We’ll be staying there. At least there will be someone there to accept it when it comes.”

  “You’ll be staying at the Mill? Why?”

  “We’ve found we rather like it there.”

  “Oh.”

  “Isolde doesn’t want to stay at my place, and to be frank, I can’t stand hers. So many hangers-on always underfoot.”

  “Oh.” They would no doubt be just as underfoot at the Mill, but never mind.

  “We’ll stay there till we find a new house.”

  “Ah.”

  “Since Hans is dead, there’s no reason not to. Is there?”

  “I guess not. Hey, you don’t have to explain to me. Tell you the truth, I think it’s the prettiest place in Munich.”

  “So do I.” Blacky lit a cigarette with that contented air of major acquisition Claire knew only too well.

  She looked at Blacky carefully. “You’re not thinking of buying the Mill?”

  Blacky lowered his upper lip.

  “Blacky, he’s barely cold.”

  Blacky shrugged. “Life goes on.” He coughed. They all had a cough, these Germans.

  “I can’t believe you.”

&nb
sp; “Why not? They can’t afford to keep it. At least I would restore it. Not turn it into some cultureless American hotel with coin-operated rattle-beds.”

  “You used to love rattle-beds.”

  “Yes, well. You see my point.”

  “What about Stella and Cosimo?”

  “Stella will be gone. She wants to join some Catholic nunnery here on Heilige Hügel, Saint Catherine of Siena. They make pots as well as beer. All the cloisters around here are famous for their beer. Maybe that’s what America needs. A good winery for their nunnery.”

  “Or at least,” Claire agreed, “some good nuns for their winery. Oh, and I already know, I mean about Stella joining the convent.”

  “You know?” He looked at her in astonishment. “Aren’t you effective! I thought we were supposed to be top secret about it. Who told you?”

  “She did. But what about Cosimo?”

  “Oh, well, Cosimo can stay with us. With Isolde and me.”

  “I thought he was mad.”

  “Well, yes. He is, quite. But I would never throw Cosimo out. I like him.”

  “You mean he would just continue to live there? Doing what?”

  “Doing exactly what he does now, verdammt noch mal! Playing his piano. Gardening. Certainly such assets are worth room and board. I think”—Blacky’s head vibrated in an unfamiliar, older-person way—“Cosimo is like poetry. I don’t know. It’s not much good to anyone, but”—he looked at Claire intently—“without it we are nothing more than robots. Yes, robots.” He gazed out over the blue lake. “I owe his father at least that,” he said.

  “Why do you owe him anything?” Claire asked, puzzled. She had a hard time picturing Blacky allowing Cosimo his serenades at four in the morning after he owned the place. “I thought you two were rivals.” Hadn’t Isolde said Blacky despised Hans?

  Blacky laughed. “On the contrary. Hans wanted Stella to marry me, or me to marry Stella.”

  Claire was stunned. “Of course.” She knew Hans wanted someone titled and with money to marry Stella. “I don’t know why I didn’t think of it. But then why did Isolde say—”

  “Oh, Isolde loves to think everyone is in love with her.” He said this mockingly.