Stolen Beauty

by Laurie Lico Albanese

  “You’re sweet, Maria, very sweet and pretty,” he said. “But I don’t think I’m good enough for you. Don’t waste your heart on me when you can have any man in Vienna.”

  I hung up and wept, but I didn’t give up. I’d set myself on him, and the gentleness in his voice had only convinced me that he was right for me.

  All through August, the Germans mounted their Degenerate Art show in Munich (millions waited in line to see it, just as Fritz had predicted). I hiked through the Alps with my cousins Eva and Dora and pretended Fritz was with me. At night I kissed my pillow for practice, and one afternoon I begged Dora to show me what she did when a man held and kissed her. My cousin Eva, who was only fourteen, giggled.

  “You mean you’ve never been kissed before?” Dora asked. She’d traveled to Rome and Florence, and whispered to us that she’d had an Italian lover. She was twenty-three and I was twenty-one, but she was decades more sophisticated than I.

  “Of course I’ve been kissed,” I said. “But that’s all I’ve done.”

  “Well, you better learn what’s what,” Dora said, “if you’re going to catch a man with a married lover.”

  Sitting under a tree with my eyes closed, my cousin nuzzled my neck, I murmured Fritz’s name, and she broke into peals of laughter. Somewhere behind her, Eva laughed, too.

  It wasn’t funny to me. I ran away from them, my eyes burning.

  When I returned home that September there were two dozen white roses waiting at the house, with a card signed, With love from Fritz. I ran down to Papa’s library to show him the note, and found Fritz’s brother Bernhard and my father drinking whiskey together.

  “Maria, I’m sure you know Herr Altmann,” Papa said. He looked very pleased with himself. “He’s come to speak to me about his brother.”

  Bernhard had a long nose and none of his brother’s elegant looks. But he was wearing a very fine suit and had a silk handkerchief in his pocket. He stood, and kissed my hand.

  “You’re even prettier than I remember,” Bernhard said.

  Bernhard was considerably older than Fritz, and had nearly raised him from the time he was small. It was Bernhard who’d turned their father’s tailoring shop into a thriving textiles business. I could imagine only one reason why he’d come to see Papa. I went to my room and jumped up and down until I was out of breath.

  After Bernhard was gone, my father sent Mama to my room to speak with me. I already had an inkling of what had happened: Bernhard had put a stop to the affair with Mathilde and urged Fritz to marry me. My mother knew how I felt about Fritz, but wanted to be sure I was in agreement with what had been proposed.

  “I’ve watched you when you’re with him, and I have no doubt that he’s won your heart,” Mama said. “I just want to make sure that he deserves it.”

  I told her I would die, positively die, if Papa didn’t say yes on my behalf. I felt certain that this was exactly how a love story should go.

  Two weeks later, Bernhard promoted Fritz to vice president of the textiles business, and Fritz came to see me. He wore a white evening jacket, and the familiar cinnamon scent of his skin was as welcome to me as air.

  “I’ve had a good long time to think about you while you were away,” Fritz said. He took me in his arms and said he loved me.

  “Your home will be with me now,” I whispered.

  On our wedding night he took off my clothes one by one until I was naked under a blanket. He kissed my body slowly, beginning at the neck and going down to my toes. I was trembling with happiness. Any reluctance he’d shown seemed a thing of the past, and our life together started out like a happy fairy tale, just as I’d dreamt.

  But with Nazi soldiers living in our newlywed apartment, and the two of us soon crowded into three narrow attic rooms, Fritz became silent and withdrawn. I began to remember the darker Grimm’s stories: the ones where the children died.

  ADELE

  1899

  I was a virgin on our wedding night, and when Ferdinand made love to me, I closed my eyes and struggled to breathe. His fat fingers were gentle, his fumbling sweet, and his caresses sincere. There was an instant of pain, the awkward weight of his body on mine, and then it was over. It wasn’t so bad, I almost blurted aloud. At least it was quick.

  We went to Paris as he’d promised, and stayed in a hotel that overlooked the Champs-Élysées. Toulouse-Lautrec’s bright posters of dancing women in ruffled dresses hung in coffeehouses and kiosk windows, and there was heady flirting in the cafés where women and men mixed freely. In Vienna most women still kept their necks and arms covered, but in Paris the women wore low necklines, rouged their lips, and stared boldly from beneath bright hats.

  It was after ten o’clock when Ferdinand slipped the maître d’ a ten franc note and we were led to two narrow chairs at a long table close to the cabaret stage. The Moulin Rouge was smoky and smelled of cheap perfume. Ferdinand ordered absinthe, and I had claret. It was too dark to see his face, but I smiled at him and looked for the tilt of his mustache that would indicate he was smiling, too. The gaslights dimmed and blinked, and music whirled in a kaleidoscope of color and noise. Soon the curtains parted and a marching band rolled onto the stage. The musicians wore funny striped jackets and played a crazy, tilted rhythm. Ladies in short skirts and fishnet stockings pranced a cancan, kicking high above their heads as the music got louder.

  The performers made bawdy jokes and double entendres in French that were beyond Ferdinand’s comprehension—and I was thankful for that, because I knew he would be shocked. Certainly, I was shocked. But I was also riveted. There was pungent sweat, bulging décolletage, and miles of crazy laughter.

  I finished my drink, and then I finished Ferdinand’s.

  “Isn’t it exciting?” I asked when there was a short break in the show.

  Before he could answer, a woman in a long red gown stepped onstage and began to sing in a smoky voice. Behind her, a line of women in short pink and black ruffled dresses swayed from side to side.

  The singer slowly stripped off her long black gloves, peeling back the fabric an inch at a time. When her hands were bare, the band slowed its tempo. The gaslights went out one by one until there was a single smoky spotlight on the red dress and a rumble of low laughter coming from the line of dancers.

  To the single beat of a deep drum, the woman slid her bare knee and then her thigh out between a long slit in her gown. I felt a jolt through my whole body.

  Ferdinand put a hand on my shoulder, and I turned, my face flush.

  “I’m sorry, Adele,” he said in my ear. “This is beneath you.”

  I thought he was joking, and asked him to order me another glass of claret. Then he stood abruptly, taking me by the elbow. I followed helplessly as he pushed his way between the narrow tables, pulling me along until we’d reached the doorway. A line of women in Egyptian costume was making its way onto the stage when he gave the coat check girl our ticket and wrapped me in my sable coat.

  “I wanted to stay!” I said when I could finally make myself heard out on the street. The red windmill was spinning against the starry sky, and wind from the river whipped around my ankles. Carriages were still arriving with gay Parisians in furs and top hats.

  “It was scandalous,” Ferdinand said. “I had no business taking you in there.”

  He set his jaw in a stubborn line. I could see he was angry, but I was angry, too.

  “We went in there together,” I said, standing up to him in a way I’d never dared speak to my father or even to my brothers. “I’m not a little girl—I can decide for myself what is proper.”

  Back at the hotel I went straight to my bedchamber and shut the door between our rooms. I fumbled in the dark before I found the lamp and turned on the key switch. I hung up my coat, and slipped off my shoes. I took down my hair and let it fall around my shoulders.

  I could still hear the music in my head, and smell the sweet perfume and cigarette smoke on my clothes. I could see the woman in the red dress showing h
er bare leg to us, the slit in her dress going higher and higher.

  It was late, but I wasn’t ready to sleep.

  I’d ordered a box of books delivered to the hotel, and they’d arrived that very afternoon. I ran my hand across the leather-bound volumes piled on a table near the window: Descartes, Schopenhauer, and Wagner. Two novels by Jane Austen. A fat anatomy book from London.

  I rang the bell for a chambermaid, and asked her to bring up some tobacco and cigarette papers.

  “Matches, also,” I added at the last minute. “And coffee.”

  I’d watched Berta rolling her own cigarettes, and seen my brothers do it at home, as well. It was easy enough. And I was alone. I could do it. I needed no one’s permission.

  I heard Ferdinand making noises on the other side of the door, but I ignored him and soon enough he must have gone to sleep. I did not. I lined up the dark cigarette paper, laid out a line of fresh tobacco, and pressed it tightly into a long cylinder that I sealed by moistening the edges. I let it dry while I changed into one of my new white sleeping gowns. After midnight, coughing and dizzy, I smoked the first cigarette of my life. I drank coffee that burned a second night into my first one. And I read two books side by side: Austen’s Emma on my left and Gray’s Anatomy on my right.

  I read deep into the night as the heroine of Austen’s tidy novel made one romantic mistake after another. When I wanted to think over a line, or had trouble puzzling out the English because I was tired, I paged through the brilliant anatomy book. I studied veins and ligaments, the system of bones and joints, and the red organs beneath a white rib cage cut in half. I found a page with the four chambers of the heart laid bare, and felt my own blood moving from one chamber to the other, the thump of my heartbeat moving with the pace of a clock over the mantel. I felt how easily life could slip from my body, as quickly as the heart could stop beating.

  The hotel went from peaceful to eerily quiet. The heat slunk from the room, and the coffee failed me. So did my anger. I became homesick for my brother, and for the simple years of my childhood. I didn’t know what I was doing so far away from home, with a man I didn’t love and didn’t know if I could love. Karl had been right when he’d warned me about the box—but he’d been wrong when he’d told me that beneath the skin everything had already begun to heal.

  I wept quietly at first.

  “You were wrong,” I said aloud, as if Karl could hear me. “You were wrong, everything isn’t healed beneath the skin.”

  I must have made more noise than I realized, because soon I heard Ferdinand insisting that I open the door.

  “It you don’t let me in, I’ll ring for the bellman and they’ll use a key to open the door from the hallway,” he said. And so I let him in. I let him find me weeping.

  “What is it?” He took me by the shoulders. “Why are you crying? Is it the cabaret? We can go back tomorrow if it means this much to you.”

  I couldn’t make it out. I couldn’t begin to explain how the woman singing in the cabaret had made me long for something I didn’t understand, or how it had been hard for me to breathe when he’d lain on top of me on our wedding night. I must have choked on my tears, because he gave me a drink of water, and when I couldn’t swallow it down he pressed my lips to the glass and tipped it toward my throat. Naturally that only made me choke harder, and as I was still crying, I began to gasp for air.

  In a panic, Ferdinand rang down to the front desk. Soon the hotel doctor swept into the room with his black bag and monocle glass, and gave me a bitter dose of laudanum.

  “Drink it slowly,” he said in French. He was a soft-spoken man, older than Ferdinand, and nothing in my behavior or appearance seemed to shock or upset him. “It will calm you.”

  He took a seat beside the bed and inspected my books one by one. I felt the medicine course through me, soothing my nerves. Ferdinand faded to the doorway between our rooms, unsure of what to do.

  “What are you reading here?” the doctor asked. “Schopenhauer is a madman, no one reads him unless they’re fond of suffering.”

  Ferdinand’s French was clumsy, but mine was fluid. I spoke quietly to the doctor about my brother’s death, and about how I’d wanted to study at university. I told him I’d become frightened that I was to live a life I didn’t want.

  “I want to read and study,” I told him. “I want to be an intellectual. Why shouldn’t I study just because I’m a woman?”

  The doctor adjusted his monocle. He seemed to give my words careful consideration.

  “You’re a young woman, and you have needs of the body as well as the mind,” he said. He spoke as a father might, if I could have spoken that way to my father, and he had understood. “You must eat and sleep well, and take in the air. Go to our museums, and see our art. Walk the street, and enjoy your days. You’re intelligent and you’re beautiful. Don’t rely on your face more than your mind, or on your mind more than your beauty. Your life will come to you. Don’t be in a hurry.”

  But I was in a hurry. I was afraid if I didn’t learn everything, and quickly, somehow life would pass me by as it had passed by Karl.

  “She’s spirited,” I heard the doctor tell Ferdinand as he was leaving. “Be careful with her. You wouldn’t want her to break on you.”

  I thought perhaps the doctor’s German was lost in translation, or that I’d heard him wrong. I was going to ask him to explain, but the medicine pulled me into deep sleep. When I woke it was early afternoon, and Ferdinand was sitting in a chair by the window.

  “Let’s go see the museums,” he said. “If you’re up to it.”

  The crying jag had frightened me. I dressed in my warmest clothes and carried my cheerful white fox muff. I put on the hat that I knew made my eyes look more green than brown, and we set off.

  By day, Ferdinand and I visited museums and braved the cold to stroll through the Luxembourg Gardens and the Tuileries. We went down crooked cobblestone streets and ducked into bright little galleries where we saw canvases filled with colorful fruit and flowers tipped at dizzying angles, yellow skies, and thick brushstrokes of blue and red. The names Van Gogh, Degas, Monet, and Cézanne were on every art dealer’s lips, and Ferdinand liked their paintings.

  “Beautiful and modern,” he said. We were standing in front of a line of Monet’s haystacks, each one fading into a changing sky of purple, yellow, pink, and blue. “I’d like to see more of this in Vienna. You’ve convinced me that this is what our city needs.”

  I saw the gallery owner making his way toward us.

  “The Impressionists aren’t of the moment anymore, Ferry.” I took his arm and led him to the door. “They’re not pushing the edges of what art can be.”

  In the winding streets, where the white peaks of the Sacré-Cœur rose above us like a goddess, galleries were exploding with paintings of naked pubescent girls cloaked in anxiety and mystery. Gauguin was showing a piece called The Spirit of the Dead Watching in a small space on Rue Laffitte: a brown-skinned girl staring out from the canvas, one eye blocked, the other shrouded in secrecy. Her naked bottom was round and firm, as ripe as a piece of fruit. Behind me was Paris and the smell of baking bread and fresh croissants, women in stylish hats, and singers whose jokes made me blush. In front of me was power and fantasy pulling me in, the way the sea tides will pull in anything that stands at the edges of the shore.

  “Symbolism—that’s what’s new,” I told Ferdinand. “I’ve been reading about it in a journal I bought yesterday on Saint-Honoré. The painters are trying to send us messages in symbols.”

  “Messages about what?” Ferry asked.

  He was genuinely trying to understand, and I was touched. I struggled to put into words what I barely understood myself.

  “About the meaning of life.” I spoke with more confidence than I felt. “About everything that we can’t see and don’t know.”

  He encouraged me to go on—that is one of the things that I valued most about him right from the start. I told him our modern painters were l
ooking beyond books and knowledge and peering into the unknown corners of the heart and the mind.

  “And even beyond that,” I added, “into the realm of spirits, death, and desire.”

  Ferdinand seemed satisfied with my answer, but I was not. I wanted to see it all for myself. I wanted to know and to understand, not to guess.

  With a map in hand, and the sun as a halfhearted compass to guide us, I went in search of my first painting by Edvard Munch that same day. At the top of the funicular we turned away from the cemetery, going behind the church and round and round past dark little shops where women lounged in doorways and the air smelled of something sweet and thick. We stopped at a creperie and had a savory cheese crepe, followed by a sweet chocolate dessert. As I was wiping my mouth and preparing to begin searching again, I spied the place I’d been looking for almost directly across the street.

  The gallery was small and cramped, and there were two cats sunning themselves in the window. The proprietor was a tall, elegant man with a salt-and-pepper mustache. Immediately he recognized that we were Viennese, and spoke to us in German. He went on about Munch’s popularity in Berlin, and how we would be bringing the modern right to Vienna if we brought his works home with us. I didn’t hear much more of what he said. I was as horrified as I was captivated by the two pieces on the wall. One was an anxious mermaid pulling herself from the sea, and the other was a naked girl sitting on a bed as if she were a butterfly pinned under glass.

  “This symbolism seems dark.” Ferdinand’s voice was clear and sure.

  He put a hand on my elbow, as if waiting for me to concur or object, but I was lost in the paintings: the mermaid caught between two worlds, and the naked girl staring out from the white sheets with her arms crossed between her legs as if she knew what was coming, and she was afraid.

  “Certainly this is not what you mean we should be doing in Vienna?” Ferdinand asked.