Stolen Beauty

by Laurie Lico Albanese

  “Where’s Berta,” I asked. I reached for my sister’s arm. “Can you find Berta?”

  I felt sure that if I could tell my friend what I’d heard, she would help me understand it.

  “You look overheated,” Thedy said. “There’s a garden café with shade trees and a fountain, let’s go sit there.”

  “I want to tell you something,” I said. “You and Berta and Ferdinand.”

  Berta came to my side, and Ferdinand to the other. All they heard was “I want.”

  “You can have anything you want,” Thedy whispered.

  “What do you want? I’ll get it for you,” Ferdinand said.

  I wanted to know what I’d just witnessed, and what it meant. I wanted to know what I would make of my life now. But these things seemed impossible to articulate, and when I tried to explain, it sounded like gibberish.

  “We’ll go home,” Ferdinand said. “You need to rest, this has been enough exertion for one day.”

  “Should we send for Dr. Tandler?” Thedy asked.

  “I don’t want to leave,” I said. I’d seen something changing in Vienna and something had changed in me. “I’ll be fine. Art always makes me feel better,” I added, and I willed it to be so.

  MARIA

  1938

  I didn’t ask again where Fritz had been the morning of Kristallnacht, and he did not bring it up. I didn’t forget, but I was too sick with worry about my mother and Uncle Ferdinand to face any other sadness.

  My husband seemed to know that I couldn’t bear to wake up or go to sleep without him. He made me tea and toast in the mornings before work, and at night he held me close. On Christmas Eve he gave me two jazz record albums wrapped in newspaper and tied with a piece of string, and I gave him a tuxedo I’d found at a second-hand store. We dressed up and danced to the new records, and in the morning we went back to making phone calls and writing letters, trying to reach anyone who could help get Mama out of Austria.

  “I found someone to forge her papers,” Bernhard finally said on a snowy Sunday afternoon. “If your mother is willing to take the chance, now is the time.”

  My mother had to make the decision and the arrangements on her own. All we could do was wait and hope.

  “Once she leaves Vienna, we’ll have no way of knowing where she is until she reaches Paris,” Bernhard added.

  I spent ten long, cold afternoons on Nettie’s couch mending socks, listening to the radio, and trying not to cry. I bit my nails to the quick, and couldn’t bring myself to cook supper unless Fritz was with me and there was music playing. I could not sleep at night without imagining my mother sleeping safely, too.

  In February Mama arrived in Liverpool by train along with thousands of others, dragging a single suitcase along the ground and wearing the long mink coat she’d had for as long as I could remember. The coat seemed to weigh her down, as if she’d shrunk since I’d seen her last. She was thin, her eyes haunted, her steps hesitant.

  My brother-in-law grabbed her suitcase, and Fritz put an arm under hers.

  At home I folded her into slippers and a warm robe and put out cakes and pastries I’d made from our rations. She wanted only to drink a cup of warm tea, and to talk about home. She knit her hands together like gloves, and ran through their names: Louise still had not been heard from; Dora and Eva had not reappeared.

  “I don’t understand how our own people could do this to us,” she said.

  “They’re not our people,” I said.

  The one bright spot of news was from my brothers Leopold and Robert, who’d finally reached Canada with their wives and children. Robert’s wife was expecting another baby, and he’d sent a postcard from Vancouver that showed mountains as high as the Alps.

  He wanted us to come live with him, but Fritz and I wanted to go to America, where some of our friends had already found work in California.

  “If you go to America, your children will be American,” Mama said one afternoon while we were folding laundry.

  “I suppose,” I said, although I had not thought of it that way.

  “Will you teach them German?” she asked without looking up. “When you have children, will they speak our language?”

  I looked at the bent crown of her gray head and realized how hard it was for her to imagine her children and grandchildren making a life away from Vienna, speaking a language she barely understood.

  “Fritz and I speak German, so of course they will.”

  “Yes, of course.” She put down the last towel, and gazed out the window. The sky was gray. Night was falling. “And will they be Jewish?”

  Fritz and I had married in Turnergasse Synagogue for the sake of tradition, not for God. Now that synagogue had been destroyed by the Nazis. I could not fathom an answer for her. There was too much uncertainty, and more questions than answers.

  “Do you feel Jewish?” I asked.

  “I didn’t used to be a Jew,” Mama said. “I used to be Viennese.”

  “Are you a Jew now?” I asked. I felt angry, but whether I was angry at my mother or at something much bigger, I couldn’t have said.

  My mother looked at me a long time.

  “You remind me of my sister Adele,” she said, finally.

  I remembered my aunt smoking her cigarettes and urging everyone to speak their mind without fear. I did not think I was like her at all.

  “She was passionate,” my mother said. “She was a fighter.”

  “I’m not that way,” I said.

  “Of course you are! You’re tenacious,” my mother said. “You wanted Fritz, and you got him. When you make up your mind, Maria, you get what you want.”

  I looked around at the flat where I’d made do. There was peeling yellow wallpaper and silver pipes that banged when the heat came up. There was a tiny closet for Fritz’s suits, and an even smaller space for my few dresses. Everything I’d ever expected to have was somewhere else, in someone else’s life.

  “Well, what I want is to . . .”

  “Yes?” My mother was waiting.

  “What I want is . . .”

  I thought of the perfume on Fritz’s collar and how sick and alone I felt when he worked long nights in London. I suppose when a man has come close to death, he does what he needs to do to feel alive—but still, I wanted him to be faithful. I wanted to forget what Landau had done to me. I wanted my own home. I wanted children and a family. I wanted what I’d expected—what I’d been promised.

  “I want to know if you think Aunt Adele had a lover,” I said. I’d heard rumors about my aunt and Gustav Klimt, and yet my uncle had never stopped loving her. He’d never once seemed anything but proud. “Do you think she had an affair with the painter?”

  My mother blinked.

  “What kind of question is that?” she asked.

  “You’re asking me all kinds of questions,” I said. “ ‘Will I have children? Will they speak German, will they be Jews?’ Now I’m asking you a question. I’m asking if she was faithful to Uncle Ferdinand. And if you think that he was faithful to her.”

  My parents had been devoted to one another. I’d rarely seen my father stay away from home overnight without my mother. But I knew that men of their generation kept mistresses, and that their wives almost always looked the other way. I didn’t think it was possible, but even my uncle might have looked the other way.

  Was I supposed to look the other way? That’s what I really wanted to ask.

  “My sister wanted to have children,” Mama said. “Instead, she had paintings. That’s all I know. I don’t even know if her husband is still alive.”

  I thought I was going to cry, but I didn’t. Instead, I put on the kettle and made us some tea.

  The door pops open at 18 Elisabethstrasse, and eight men in dark suits step into the silent palais. The rooms are cold and dusty. Spiders run from the center of thick webs and hide in shadows. Mice scamper into dark corners in the pantry. A young clerk in a long green coat marks the date in a ledger: January 28, 1939.
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  Hitler’s men fan through the dark rooms, each with a task: count the porcelain, inventory the Wiener Werkstätte silver, collect the fur coats and crystal glasses, the table linens and the leather-bound books. Tag each item, and cross-check it on the inventory list. Prepare the best works for the Führer’s art museum in Linz.

  In Adele’s old parlor, two men from the Reich’s Central Monuments Office pull open the blue silk curtains. Sunlight cuts through unsettled dust, and illuminates the golden portrait.

  “Maybe the Führer will want this for his museum.”

  “I don’t think so,” says the first. “Maybe he’ll melt it down for the gold.”

  “It’s here, on the list. Adele Bloch-Bauer I 1907. Signed, lower right. Gustav Klimt.”

  ADELE

  1909

  My portrait traveled across the empire to Budapest and beyond, and it was celebrated everywhere. There were critics of course: a reviewer said I looked like something sprung from the dreams of a hashish addict. Another said the painting had “more brass than Bloch,” as if the silver and gold were gaudy and overpowering rather than magnificent. But people of good taste and education called it a masterpiece. Some even called me the queen of Vienna.

  “They love you as much as they loved Empress Sisi,” Ferdinand bragged one rainy morning as thunder and lightning raged outside our windows.

  “That’s impossible.” I smiled with embarrassment, but I was also delighted.

  Imagine your face sent as an envoy to cities you’ll never visit, your portrait gazing across stately museums you’ll never see. Friends and strangers began sending notes and postcards to ask what I was reading and which lectures I was attending. They stopped me on the Ring and asked when I would start hosting my salons again. Everyone knew I’d lost the child, and I thought they were pitying me. Thedy said it wasn’t time, but it was Alma Mahler who convinced me.

  “Your parlor one of the few places in Vienna where a woman’s ideas are taken seriously,” Alma said when I saw her on the steps of the opera house.

  Other women might have felt differently, but to me the recognition was a welcome balm to what I’d most feared: obscurity, purposelessness and the prison of an idle bourgeois life—especially one without children.

  With my husband’s encouragement, I sent handwritten invitations and welcomed two dozen more friends to my salon that year. Dr. Julius Tandler brought along three professors who lectured on political theory and economics, and Ferdinand invited two of his fellow industrialists to attend with their wives. The businessmen and professors eyed one another skeptically, but we served cheese and duck confit with fresh bread, and poured the wine liberally. Once people were sated and relaxed, I said I wanted my salon to go beyond art, literature, and music, and asked what subjects would be of interest in the months ahead.

  “What is modern man?” Alice Saltzer proposed.

  Her husband was a banker who’d invested heavily in my father’s railroads, and I’d always enjoyed her view of the world.

  “What is modern woman?” her sister counter-proposed, which delighted me even more.

  Berta suggested we discuss women’s suffrage, but when the businessmen bristled, I quickly marshaled a consensus around the intersection of business, politics, and modernity.

  I had not forgotten what I’d seen and heard at the Kunstschau. The city’s economy was in a slump. Emperor Franz Joseph was growing old and had lost much of his vigor. Karl Lueger’s Christian Social Party had gotten bolder, meaner, and more popular. We all felt Vienna’s anxiety; we all wanted to understand why so many women were collapsing from nervous hysteria and why men were committing suicide in broad daylight.

  “It seems we are in an age of great anxiety,” I said.

  “It’s the specter of war in the Balkans,” Professor Rosen said.

  “It’s the German economy that’s threatening to bring down the empire’s,” one of Ferdinand’s colleagues replied, and so our lively year began.

  I could not entice Klimt to my new salon. He insisted that art and politics were of two different worlds, and required different kinds of men.

  “To be honest,” he wrote to me, “I am painfully bored by politics.”

  This was the first time I saw Klimt as a man limited in his vision. His mastery of imagination and imagery had not dimmed, but to separate art from politics—and the political man of reason from the artistic man of passions—seemed wrong. Klimt and the other modernists had taken us from decorative art to true art; it felt essential that we do the same with our politics, and that those of us who were deep thinkers lead the way. But there was no changing his mind, and that was very disappointing to me.

  I had purpose, though.

  I went with Dr. Tandler to a series of lectures on Socialism, and read the pamphlets he put in my hands. Once my eyes had been opened, I saw the poor everywhere. I saw them coming from church, carrying day-old bread, and gathering at anti-Semitic rallies wearing the red flowers of Lueger’s party.

  When Mayor Lueger shouted, “You’re hungry because of the Jews,” and the crowds of laborers cheered, I knew we had to find a way to keep impoverished Austrians from hating us.

  “Lueger won’t live forever. Things will change after he’s gone,” Ferdinand said. “Then it will be the industrialists’ time to rise.”

  Lueger died in 1910, and it did seem that a new age was indeed upon us. Ferdinand traded our carriages and horses for two sleek black automobiles, and had a telephone installed in my sitting room. We put electric lights in every room, and hired a driver for our cars. We doubled our art collection, adding another Klimt landscape, two Kokoschkas, and two beautiful white Minne sculptures.

  When Ferdinand said he wanted a second portrait of me, I phoned Klimt to ask if he could make the sketches at home, in my own parlor.

  “If that’s what you want,” he said, and I assured him it was.

  What had happened in his studio had happened in another lifetime. I didn’t want to have it all opened up again, when I knew that I was not the same woman I had been.

  Klimt arrived early on a spring day with his son Chicky carrying a sketch pad and box of tools and supplies. The boy was twelve years old, with a head of curly dark hair and a jacket that was too small. He took furtive looks around my parlor, his eyes lingering on the silver tableware, the white and gold porcelain, the elaborate clock Ferdinand had commissioned from Josef Hoffmann. He stared, with his mouth open, at my portrait over the fireplace, until his father noticed and told him to get busy setting up the easel.

  “You look tired,” I said to Klimt when he came close.

  “I’m having some treatments,” he said. His eyes were rheumy, and he had a scarf around his neck: sure signs of an unchecked illness.

  “Do you need money for a sanitarium?” I asked quietly. I saw the boy shifting from one leg to another, pushing back his bushy black hair. “Or maybe for the baths at Bad Ischl?”

  Klimt lifted my hand, and pressed his lips against my scar.

  “You’ve already given me so much,” he said. I was surprised to see tears in his eyes. “You made my best work possible.”

  “Don’t.” I pulled my hand free. “You’ll make me cry, and I’ve had my makeup done for the portrait.”

  “You’re so bossy,” he said with a teary laugh. “As always.”

  “As always,” I said. “Now let’s get started.”

  He asked for a pencil and pad, and had me stand away from the window.

  “What colors do you want for the dress?” he asked as he made his first, long pencil stroke.

  “Whatever you want,” I said. “I trust you.”

  “You’re just saying that because I called you bossy.”

  “Yes,” I said, smiling. “That’s true.”

  Because another pregnancy could kill me, Ferdinand had stopped coming to my room at night. It was a relief, at first, to never have him in my bed, but after a while I found that I missed him.

  “Sleep with me, Ferdina
nd?” I asked one evening, and there was so much tenderness in his face, I was sorry I hadn’t asked sooner. I held and touched him as I used to, and when he was there when I woke, I was glad.

  When he asked what I would like for my thirtieth birthday, I told him I wanted to build a public art collection. I knew art could speak to people in ways words often failed to do. I also knew that if there were ever to be art for the people, and a bridge between the bourgeois and the masses, it would have to happen through a decided effort of Austria’s most enthusiastic patrons.

  “It’s something we can do for the city,” I said. “And it will mean a lot to me.”

  Ferdinand’s wealth and good standing with the emperor made it possible for him to ask for almost anything and have it. Within the year, he was a founding member of the Austrian State Galleries, and by 1913, when the first radio waves were crossing Germany and the Russians were secretly arming agitators in Sarajevo and Croatia, I was spending a good deal of my time considering all that did and did not belong in a national collection celebrating modern art.

  Our curator championed some of the more daring Expressionists, but I jettisoned them for safer, more fundamentally appealing works by Van Gogh and Rodin. These were men whose work the average person could appreciate.

  “Adele, you were once so bold,” Klimt said when we met at the opening night of the opera. Flöge was beside him, looking like a strange peacock in a bright purple dress. “Why would you keep Schiele out of the Belvedere?”

  “I didn’t keep him out,” I said. The strains of the flutists warming up somewhere behind the velvet curtain floated through the air. “I simply made sure there was enough room for your best work. Ferdinand is trying to buy Medicine for the museum. You don’t object to that, do you?”