Ferdinand put a hand on the small of my back and guided me through the crowd. The gold-embossed wallpaper made the room glow like the inside of a treasure box. Dozens of men sat at round white tables drinking coffee, smoking, reading the newspapers, and arguing. The swell of their voices reminded me of the chorus of voices I’d often heard around my family’s afternoon dinner table. From each group there were names and words that meant something to me—the empire’s greatest . . . Parisian women . . . the exposition . . . dancers . . . medical training . . . Schopenhauer . . . damn the Italian count . . . plans for the Jubilee Ball, and so on. It was hard to keep my head from spinning around at each enticing conversation.
I was wearing a smart blue cape and a new hat, and some of the men looked up as we passed. It was clear they didn’t often see a young woman there, even in the afternoon, and I rather enjoyed the shocked expressions on their faces.
We found Berta in a red booth, sitting beneath a large portrait of Emperor Franz Joseph. She had a sweep of dark hair coiled loosely around her face, and a square jaw that made her more handsome than beautiful. She wore a bright shawl over her dress—a touch of the bohemian that I’d never seen another woman dare to wear in Vienna. And she was smoking a cigarette. In public.
In that instant I not only wanted to know and impress Berta but, as much as possible, I wanted to be Berta Zuckerkandl.
“My brother Karl was a student at the university,” I told her after we’d been properly introduced. “He was reading anatomy with your husband, Herr Doctor Zuckerkandl.”
Berta seemed to know all about my brother, and I wasn’t surprised. Our circle in Vienna was small enough so that we had a passing acquaintance with all the best families, and knew their histories even if they weren’t on our regular social calendars.
“My husband said your Karl was very promising,” she told me. “We were all sorry when he passed.”
Dark mirrors hung on the walls, and overhead there were gaslight chandeliers. At a nearby table, a group of young men had opened up a passel of sketch pads and were talking heatedly about Josef Olbrich and his design for the Secession gallery.
“It’s about ornament and function,” someone said, and another replied with a sharp observation about the contrast of the simple square foundation and intricate gold dome.
“Like a white wedding cake,” Ferdinand murmured so that only I heard.
“It’s a temple,” another one of the young men said. “A place of refuge.”
I told Berta I admired her opinions, and asked what she knew about Gustav Klimt and the artists he had gathered around him.
“Klimt is the most daring and innovative artist in Europe,” she said without hesitating. “He’s single-handedly changing modern art in Vienna, but I’m afraid he may pay a price for his vision.”
I wanted to know more, but Berta would only say that Klimt’s new murals for the university were going to be bold, dark, and startling.
“He’s a very well-liked man,” she said. “That may serve him in the end, but one can never tell how useful popularity is in the face of one’s critics.”
“In the face of critics, one needs powerful allies,” Ferdinand said.
Berta smiled, and patted his hand.
“It’s wonderful to see you cultivating a patron’s attitude,” she said.
Coffee was served on a silver tray, with glasses of cold water and a pretty bowl piled with sugar cubes—“from your factory, Ferdinand?” Berta asked—and the taste of the chocolate cake was made only richer by the dense cigarette smoke that filled the air. As we were finishing our cakes, Berta pointed out the writer Peter Altenberg sitting at a corner table, scribbling away.
“Schnitzler and Salten should be arriving in about an hour,” she said. “The three of them start with coffee and end with cognac. Sometimes they read aloud to one another, and bits of poetry land on my table like beautiful birds.”
The café windows looked out onto Herrengasse as if upon another world.
“I do so admire you,” I told Berta impulsively. Just being with her made me feel emboldened. She reached across the table, and I barely had time to pull back my mangled hand before she took the good one in her own.
“And I admire you,” she said. “You’re beautiful and intelligent, with your whole life ahead of you.”
She promised to invite me to coffee as soon as she returned from the country, and she hugged me good-bye.
“Thank you, Ferdinand,” I said after we’d stepped out into the balmy evening and watched Berta disappear into the streets. “I’ve never met anyone like her before.”
“You are like her, Adele.” He stared at me intently. “Don’t you see that you have just as much spirit, and just as fine a mind?”
Two nights later, Ferdinand took me to ride on the Ferris wheel in the Prater, where we stood in a huge red car the size of two carriages and watched Vienna’s rooftops spinning below us. Maybe it was nerves, maybe it was meeting Berta and thinking of all those years at Karl’s side, yearning to learn everything he knew. Soon I was going on and on to Ferdinand about the books I’d read and the things I still hoped to discover.
He looked at me with great kindness as I spoke about the Eternal Return, about time as a circle, about loving one’s fate.
“Amor fati—love your fate,” I said as the Ferris wheel came to a stop and I stepped onto a ground that seemed to buckle and spin beneath my feet. I felt free, and terribly intelligent. “That’s Nietzsche, in case you didn’t know.”
“I didn’t know,” he said with what seemed like an indulgent smile. “But now I do.”
Ferdinand bought me a cold lemonade and found us a quiet bench in one of the gardens. A line of tall trees towered over us like sentinels from another world, polka music from a brass band floated through the air and dropped its tinny notes at our feet, the last dogwood blossoms blew across the gardens and accumulated at the edges of the graveled promenade.
He cupped my gnarled fingers as he might have held a tiny bird. It’s strange how it’s all so clear and yet so otherworldly, as if he’d manufactured that moment the way his factory manufactured sugar cubes in neat rows and perfect stacks.
“You’re beautiful, and I’m very fond of you,” Ferdinand said gently. “You can trust me, I’ll take good care of you, and I’ll give you as much freedom as you want.”
He looked at me steadily, his brown eyes searching my face. My brothers played chess, and David had taught me the game one summer in the country. He’d checkmated me dozens of times, and always there was that moment when my heart dropped into my feet and I could see the pieces closing in and could not find a way out. I felt something like that, at that moment.
“Our families are already joined,” Ferdinand said. “The Blochs and the Bauers are among the best families in Vienna. If we marry, our union will make us a dynasty.”
He said it quietly. I saw the Ferris wheel circling in the distance and could almost feel the artists on the other side of Vienna, chipping away at the golden dome.
I’d read all the fairy tales when I was a girl and knew the princes were supposed to be handsome. I’d seen the men working outside the Secession gallery and felt myself stirring in response. Yet younger men had courted me, and they’d been like bumblebees on flowers, easily swatted away and easily replaced.
Ferdinand had much to offer. I had encouraged his affection, and I knew it. And then there was Thedy, my dear Thedy, telling me what a great honor it would be to marry into the Bloch family.
“I can’t give you an answer now,” I said.
“Of course you can’t,” he said. “There’s no rush. You’ll have all the time you want. All the time you need to consider, and to weigh it all out.”
I stayed up all night, my stomach churning. I wondered what it meant, that I’d been more drawn to Berta’s intelligence and charm than to Ferdinand or any other man that I’d ever met. How I wished Thedy were sleeping in her old room instead of in her new home, with her new husband. I wanted to as
k her so many things that I knew I would never be able to ask her in the light of day—about love and passion, about intimacy and yearning.
Ferdinand was twice my age, but he was wealthy, kind, and unafraid of new ideas. I didn’t think I loved him. But did that matter? Should it matter? I thought he would make a fine husband, and an excellent father for the children I wanted to have.
When dawn broke, I made my way downstairs and asked Cook for a boiled egg and a cup of tea. It was a warm day, and the servants were preparing to move everything to the summerhouse. My head ached, and the place where my fingers had been caught in the wagon wheel throbbed as if every wound were open anew.
Soon Mother took her regular seat at the table, and opened the newspaper. She let me be, and I wondered if she knew about Ferdinand’s proposal. I wondered about my sister and Gustav, and about Berta and her husband. I thought about what it would mean to have the power to do what Ferdinand had promised, to go where I wanted and read what I wanted. I thought of the years I’d heard Mother crying in her room, about the mistresses that I’d heard whispered of, and about women in loveless marriages. I didn’t want that for myself.
I was thinking about mistresses and marital intimacies when Father came into the room and pointed a finger at me.
“You were seen in the neighborhood of the Secession gallery, watching the men working in their shirtsleeves,” Father said. He didn’t even sit down. Mother rushed to tell him that I’d gone with Ferdinand Bloch, but he didn’t give her the chance to speak. “I was willing to let that go, until Dr. Bratislav told me you were seen in the Café Central with a woman who was smoking cigarettes.”
“Yes, Father,” I began. “That’s Frau Berta—”
He cut me off.
“I don’t care who it is. You cannot go where you do not belong,” he said in a hard voice. “I will not tolerate it. Not as long as I’m your father and you live in my home.”
I felt the brightness in me fading, and that frightened me far more than Ferdinand’s marriage proposal had. I tried again.
“Frau Zuckerkandl is married to Dr. Zuckerkandl. Karl read with him at university.”
At the mention of Karl’s name, my father’s face purpled.
“Karl is dead, Adele. And the rebel painters and books, the philosophers, the art journals—those aren’t for you. Those are not for a young woman on the verge of marriageable age. You’ll learn to behave decently, or you will have a very difficult time in this world.”
In a shaking hand, I wrote Ferdinand a long note that afternoon. I said that I wanted to read philosophy and anatomy, to study art and go to Paris. I said that if those things were acceptable to him, and if in fact he meant what he said about the avant-garde, then I would be his wife and glad of it.
“Amor fati,” Ferdinand wrote in return. “If I’m your fate, Adele, I hope you will love it—and me.”
“Maybe you don’t love him now,” Thedy said when I told her, “but you will have a good life with him, and you can learn to love him, Adele. I believe you can and that you will.”
I had found a suitable and respected man with whom I could have a family. A man who held the keys to all those doors and books I wanted to open. I believed—at least I hoped—that all good things were to come for me.
MARIA
1938
As Fritz and I gathered our belongings for the move upstairs, I found a copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales my aunt had given me when I was young. I’d been a six-year-old princess then, prepared to kiss a lot of toads before I found my prince. I’d worn my hair in a fat braid like Rapunzel, and imagined one day it would be long enough to toss out the window for my true love.
I’d grown into an equally romantic young woman with fairy-tale ideas—and when I met Fritz at the Lawyers’ Ball, I’d known it was love at first sight.
“You sing beautifully, Herr Altmann,” I’d told Fritz on that first evening. “My father is a musician, and I hope we’ll hear you perform again.”
His eyes swept from my face down to my gown and up again. He smiled. I was twenty-one. He was considerably older—just shy of thirty, as it turned out—which appealed to me. I wanted a worldly, musical man.
“That would be very nice,” he said. “I hope we’ll meet again.”
I made certain that we did. I dragged Lily and my sister to every party that season and flirted shamelessly with Fritz whenever I could. I’d heard all about his married lover, but he was always alone when I saw him, and that gave me hope. He had been raised among the shtetl Jews, and my family was one of Vienna’s wealthiest. I felt sure that he would call on me, if only I made it clear that he was welcome.
When he finally came to our palais on a Sunday afternoon at the end of June, I had nearly given up hope. He wore a brown cashmere jacket and carried a huge bunch of yellow tulips, which he handed right to Mama.
“Your home is lovely,” he said. “And so is your daughter.”
It was 1937, and I’d seen my share of romantic movies by then. Fritz was my idea of the perfect leading man, and the gazebo my mother had set up with refreshments and fresh flowers was the ideal setting for our first true rendezvous. I introduced him to my sister Louise and her new husband, and to my brothers, who shook his hand with too much enthusiasm. I had just given him a glass of punch when my uncle Ferdinand rushed in carrying one of his anti-German newspapers.
“Picassos, Pissarros, Cézannes, and Beckmanns,” Uncle Ferdinand said, even before he’d taken off his hat. “They’re purging art museums and private collections in Germany now.”
A few of the guests peeled away, but the rest of us gathered round as my uncle delivered the news.
“A new German law lets the Nazis confiscate anything they call Degenerate Art,” Uncle Ferry said. “They can walk right into anyone’s house and take the art right off the walls.”
My uncle had an extensive art collection—my aunt’s portrait was his most treasured piece, but all the pieces were important to him.
“That’s in Germany, Ferry,” my father said. He put aside his cello and rubbed his hands together. “Your art collection will be fine.”
“This is bigger than my collection,” Uncle Ferdinand said. He sounded indignant, as if maybe my father didn’t understand what was at stake. I glanced nervously at Fritz. I didn’t want anything to ruin the afternoon. But Fritz, too, seemed unperturbed. He asked to have a look at the newspaper, and read the story slowly.
“It says the German minister of propaganda is going to put on a Degenerate Art Show in Munich,” Fritz said. “Maybe when the paintings are all together, people will see how splendid they are.”
My uncle looked at Fritz for the first time. He said that made some sense, but that it didn’t comfort him one bit.
“Let’s not talk about Germany,” Mama said. She took my uncle’s hat and walking stick, and handed them to the maid. “We’ve all come to hear music.”
“If Adele were alive, she wouldn’t let you change the subject so quickly,” my uncle said.
Mama put on a sunny voice and indicated with her eyes that Uncle Ferdinand should not ruin her party. I took my cue from my mother and turned a bright smile on Fritz.
“We’ll live to regret it,” I heard my uncle say.
“I wouldn’t worry about things in Munich,” Fritz said to me. By then we’d taken a window seat in the next room, and our knees were only inches apart. “I’ve always preferred Paris, anyway.”
“I hear Paris is full of jazz now,” I said. “Do you like jazz?”
I didn’t know much about jazz, but I so wanted to impress him.
“Jazz is exciting—but it’s confusing,” Fritz said. “I love opera, to be honest.”
“So do I.” I gushed like the girl I was, and pretended it was music that was making me giddy. “I’d give anything to see Lotte Lehmann sing Wagner.”
“I’d give anything to take you dancing,” he said. I felt as if the top of my head would explode.
I waited a week and then l
et him take me to a nightclub near the Old Danube. I’d only been to a nightclub once before, and as we walked beneath the bright yellow lights and through a narrow doorway I was so overcome with lovesickness that I could hardly make a sound.
The club was hot and crowded. The jazz band was from Paris, and all but one of the men was black-skinned. Until then I’d only heard jazz on the radio. Fritz was right; jazz was exciting but confusing. It was impossible to waltz to the beat, and we laughed at our own clumsiness as we tried to imitate the dance moves of more chic and graceful couples.
When we’d had enough, Fritz guided me to a table in the corner. I ordered a whiskey sour because I thought it was sophisticated.
“I work for my brother’s textile business now,” Fritz said. “But I aspire to the opera. I know it’s a dream, but I can’t seem to let go of it.”
I took a careful sip of my drink, and the tart lemon surprised me.
“You shouldn’t let go of your dream,” I said. “To my father, music is the most important thing in the world.”
When Fritz walked me home that evening, I put a hand on his arm and tipped my face. When he put his lips on mine, I tasted cinnamon and stars. Yes, I did. I tasted cinnamon stars.
At my near-hysterical insistence, my mother put off our move to the country house that summer and hosted music brunches and cocktail parties twice weekly through July. Fritz came to most of them, and paid special attention to me, but there were no stolen kisses besides the ones in my imagination.
“He will hurt you,” Lily warned me again. “I’ve asked around; he’s crazy about that Czech woman. Her name is Mathilde.”
But Mathilde was married, and I was not. He was sweet on me, I felt sure of it. One Sunday afternoon, as he was waiting for his hat, I slipped him a love letter that I’d toiled over alone in my room.
Darling Fritz, I want you to know that I love and admire everything about you. If you make yourself known to my father as a suitor, I promise you won’t be disappointed.
I lost six pounds waiting for him to reply, and when he did, it was by telephone several days later. It was hot, and even the ceiling fans did little to cool the house.
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