Stolen Beauty

by Laurie Lico Albanese

  “Will there be pictures of ladies in beautiful dresses?” Maria asked, tipping her face to me. She was missing two front teeth, and her tongue caught and lisped on all those sibilant sounds. “I love to draw ladies in pretty dresses.”

  “There will be many women in beautiful dresses,” I said as we stepped up into the castle galleries. “But art doesn’t have to be about ladies in pretty dresses, you know.”

  I saw her puzzle over this.

  “I know,” she said, her face brightening. “There are pretty paintings of trees and gardens, too. Like the trees you have in your parlor,” she said. “But you know I like your portrait best, don’t you, Aunt Adele?”

  “Art doesn’t need to be pretty,” I said. “Sometimes art can be about things that are scary or even—”

  She tugged on my hand.

  “Can we get ice cream and go to the zoo later?” she asked.

  “That might be enjoyable,” I said. “But first we’re going to the museum. Don’t you want to learn about art? It means everything to me,” I added. “Art is a tonic for even the saddest days.”

  “Are you sad?” Maria asked, cocking her head.

  “No,” I said. “But everyone is sad sometimes, and art is one of the best remedies for a bout of melancholy. Art speaks to you, and you don’t have to say anything in reply.”

  Inside the Belvedere we went right upstairs to Van Gogh’s Plain Near Auvers, where I was sure the bright colors would appeal to her: green grass waving in the wind, clouds running across a deep blue sky, and a bright orange patch of wheat in the distance.

  “What do you think of this one?” I asked.

  “I like the green grass,” Maria said carefully, looking to me for approval. “But why are the clouds green, too?”

  Her question was simple, and I wanted my answer to be just as clear.

  “Because that’s what the artist saw when he looked across the fields,” I said. “Have you ever looked at lake water and seen the trees and all the clouds reflected there?”

  She nodded, and her face brightened at a memory. “I remember once it looked like our rowboat was floating in the sky,” she said.

  “That’s exactly right.” I took her hand. “You know there’s no rowboat in the sky and no clouds in the lake, but that’s what you remember when you saw it, and so that might be what you would paint if you were an artist.”

  “When the painter made your portrait, he saw you in a dress made of gold?” she asked.

  “Maybe,” I said. “Maybe that’s what he saw.”

  She looked at me as if she’d never quite seen me before.

  “I think he loved you, and that’s why he made you look like a queen,” she said.

  “No, sweetie,” I said, startled at the ache in my throat. “He made me look like a queen because that’s what Uncle Ferry told him to do.”

  After we’d looked at a few more paintings I buttoned up her coat, climbed back into the car, and took her to the Schönbrunn Zoo. We found the ice cream stand, and had two big scoops of vanilla piled onto a sugar cone.

  It was late afternoon. Across the graveled courtyard, the zookeeper was throwing raw meat into the lions’ cage while the tigers and panthers paced and roared for their food. I couldn’t help but think of Rilke’s panther, who’d seen no world beyond his iron bars.

  I pointed to a lone tigress clawing at the bottom of her cage. The beautiful, trapped animal made me sick with regret.

  “She wants her freedom,” I said.

  “Like Rapunzel,” Maria said. “And the girl in the story, who eats the seeds.”

  “Yes,” I said, pleased that she remembered. “Like Persephone.”

  “Her mother saves her,” Maria said. She looked up at me with wide eyes. “Do you think someone will save the tiger, too?”

  “No,” I said. I didn’t believe in lying to children. “No one is going to set this animal free.”

  “Maybe we can,” she said. “You and Uncle Ferdinand know all the important people. Can you set her free?”

  Maria was holding her melting ice cream cone and peering at the tiger with an entirely different look on her face than she’d had before. I thought perhaps I’d been too frank with her, and cursed myself silently.

  “I would, if I could,” I said. I took her sticky hand in mine, and pulled her gently away from the cage. “You have to be fierce, Maria,” I said, leaning down and looking into her bright face. “Don’t let anyone put you in a cage, Maria. Not ever. Because once you’re in a cage, it’s very, very hard to get out.”

  A few days later, I thought of Maria’s sunny, determined face as my driver pulled up to the address Julius Tandler had given me. We were in the Meidling District, where the buildings were stark and close together and the sidewalks were cracked and uneven. When I opened the car door, I could smell rotting garbage in the alleyways.

  Inside the Hospital for Unwed Mothers, the hallways were dark and there was a strong smell of antiseptic. I was relieved when Tandler met me near the front desk.

  “I’m so glad you’ve come,” he said, taking my hands in his. The hospital was new, and he was struggling to raise funding. The walls were bare, but the floors were scrubbed and there was a hushed air about the place. We walked through a narrow corridor without windows, and my eyes slowly adjusted to the dark.

  “Right now we’ve got sixteen women in residence,” he said. “In the morning, the girls take classes on childcare and we make sure they get plenty of exercise and good food. We have nurses on staff, but we always need volunteers to help with the infants.”

  “Not I,” I said, forcing a laugh.

  “Of course not,” Tandler said. “You’re important because you have people’s attention. They respect you. You can tell them about the work we’re doing, and help us raise money.”

  “Really, Julius,” I said. “That’s almost too direct.”

  “Look around,” he said. “We need bedding and medicine. Last week we lost two newborns. I don’t have time to be politic, I’ll leave that to you.”

  A pretty redhead with a heavy belly smiled meekly at the doctor as we passed. The slope of her shoulders and her smooth skin reminded me of the girls I’d seen in Klimt’s studio a long time ago.

  “Imagine what it would mean to these girls to have a real library,” Tandler said. We’d reached the end of the hallway and came to a bright room full of windows. There was a simple wooden table and chairs, and a shelf full of dog-eared books. “Not just books on health but literature, poetry—things that can open their minds. You’d be giving them such a gift.”

  We were close to the nursery; I could hear children mewling and crying, and mothers trying to soothe them. I thought about all the models I’d seen at Klimt’s studios, and the fact that I had never once worried over their fates.

  “We can raise money for medicine and also for books,” I said. “I think that’s a wonderful idea.”

  I lit the candles in my parlor moments before the guests were due to arrive. It was the beginning of the salon season, and I’d spent the day preparing an introduction and champagne toast for Karl Renner, who would be my guest of honor.

  “Champagne for Karl?” Ferdinand asked when he came into the parlor.

  “Socialists are happy to drink champagne with the rest of Vienna,” I said, knowing he was only teasing. “And I’m sure you’ll be very hospitable to my friend when he gets here.”

  “I will be,” Ferdinand said. “But only because it will please you.”

  “That’s good enough reason for me,” I said.

  I’d asked Berta to come early, and after she’d been poured a glass of wine, I practiced my introduction for her.

  “I’m proud to welcome a modern leader whose wisdom has brought our country into a kinder and more prosperous era.” I tried to speak spontaneously rather than to read from my notes. “We once led the world in modern art, and now we will lead Europe in social and political causes as well.”

  “It’s perfect,” Be
rta said. “You know your material inside out.”

  Just then the bell rang, and the butler showed in Renner, Tandler, and the Schwartzenbergs—who were already tipsy and gay enough to turn the whole evening into a party rather than the serious event I’d imagined.

  Two dozen friends followed, including the Lederers and the Pulitzers, the Saltzer sisters, and a few of Ferdinand’s banking friends’ wives. The wealthy bourgeois women expected another spirited evening of conversation, but by the time Tandler finished describing the terrible conditions in Vienna’s orphanages, they’d agreed to donate more money than Serena and I combined.

  When Renner put on his top hat and set out for home at the end of the evening, we had secured nearly forty thousand crowns for a new X-ray machine, a library for Tandler’s hospital, and funding to help the poor.

  “They gave more than I hoped,” I said after the door had closed for the last time. “Enough to keep the hospital for unwed mothers in operation for some time.”

  I fell into a divan by the fireplace. Ferdinand sat beside me, and took my feet into his lap. He was almost sixty years old, but he was still robust, and at the peak of his financial powers.

  “The rest can go for other social programs—for a children’s health clinic that we’re building—Ferry, you don’t object to these things, do you?”

  He kneaded the arches of my feet.

  “I don’t object, of course I don’t,” he said. “You have your causes and I have mine.”

  “Will you promise to keep my commitments, even if something happens to me?” I asked.

  “You’ll outlive me by ten years or more,” he said as he pressed my feet together and squeezed the toes gently. “But if you’re worried about it, you can write your own will, and I promise you I’ll honor it.”

  MARIA

  1942

  I traded everything for a safe home in the California sun. I did it because I had no choice. I learned to cook bacon, eggs, and sliced white bread toast for breakfast. I counted out trolley fare and got on and off the tall black steps, tugging my baby stroller with one hand and holding on to my toddler with the other.

  At least in California there were plenty of others like me, and when I spoke with my Viennese accent, the Americans knew why I was there.

  “Refugee?” they asked when I signed my little ones up for a free milk program.

  “I’m an Austrian Jew,” I said, straightening proudly. “And I’m very grateful to be in America.”

  Bernhard and his family lived north of Los Angeles, and we moved into a bungalow ranch in Cheviot Hills. I hung red-and-white-checkered curtains in my kitchen windows, and cooked apricot tortes and apple strudels that made the house smell like my childhood home. Fritz found a good-paying job selling airplane machinery for Lockheed, and for a very long time he came home every night. We had our two little boys one after the other, and as soon as they could walk they rushed out to meet their father when his car pulled into the smooth new driveway.

  “Papa, play baseball with us,” they called, and Fritz learned to throw a baseball so that he could teach our sons.

  But the war wasn’t over, and not everyone was sympathetic or friendly. More than once I saw people mouth the word “Jews,” when I walked the children to the park, and there was a regular Sunday radio hour about Jews, “the Jesus-killers.” Still, I felt safe in my little white house surrounded by refugees from home. Arnold Schoenberg—the composer who’d been a friend of my parents’—lived nearby with his second wife and family. Alma Mahler and her third husband made a stir when they came to Los Angeles and bought a house like ours, and then Eric Zeisl, who wrote music for Hollywood movies, moved just three blocks away from us with his wife, Trudy.

  Trudy became one of my closest friends, and when she rang me on the telephone, it always cheered me.

  “Let’s go to the park,” she’d say on bright days, and, “let’s take the children to the cinema,” she’d say on rainy days.

  When the phone rang one fine spring morning after a week of rain, I was preparing a picnic lunch for our outing to the park.

  “Good morning, darling, I’m making the chicken salad,” I said when I answered.

  “A collect call for Maria Altmann,” the operator said in Swiss-German. “From Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer.”

  “Uncle Ferdinand?” I whispered. It was seven in the morning. My little boys were just waking. I tried to do the calculations in my head: Was it yesterday in Switzerland? Was it tomorrow?

  “Maria, they’ve taken my Adele,” my uncle said. The line went scratchy. There was the sound of an airplane overhead and I heard my uncle’s breath growing raspy. “The lawyer lied . . . only thing he sent is my Kokoschka.”

  “Who?” I asked. “Who’s taken the portrait?”

  “The Nazis,” he said. “Of course, the Nazis.”

  I wanted to help my uncle. It seemed something that my aunt would have done if she were alive. But I’d been caught in a cage with no way out but America. And I’d run without looking back.

  “I want my Adele,” Uncle Ferdinand said. It sounded like he was weeping.

  Fritz appeared beside me in his blue pajamas, and I held out the receiver so that he could hear my uncle, too.

  “Uncle Ferdinand, you should come to California,” Fritz said loudly.

  “I’m sick,” my uncle said. “I’m losing my vision. You’re young and strong. I need you to help me, Maria.”

  I knew that I should care very much about my aunt’s painting, but it was my uncle’s heartbreak that hurt me more. It was Uncle Ferdinand, once so brave and strong, who haunted me long after we’d disconnected the line.

  On opening night of the 1943 Gustav Klimt retrospective exhibition, scores of proud Nazi officials crowd under Koloman Moser’s stained glass roundel in the lobby of the newly christened Friedrichstrasse Exhibition Hall and raise full glasses toward the portrait of Adele.

  “To Gustav Klimt,” Vienna’s new governor says. “One of our greatest painters.”

  “To Klimt,” the crowd says in unison. The men’s silver and gold medals shine under the lights, the women’s jewels glitter. “Heil Hitler.”

  A string quartet plays Beethoven, waiters circulate with caviar on water crackers, bottles of French Taittinger are popped open, and pungent cigar and cigarette smoke clouds the air. Women blot bright red lips on linen cocktail napkins. The men who emptied 18 Elisabethstrasse gather around the city’s leaders.

  “I remember when the Secession gallery was new and bold,” a woman says to her husband, but he hushes her with a warning, saying, “This is the Friedrichstrasse Hall now.”

  Golden Adele, bare-breasted Judith, smiling Fritza Riedler, and Margaret Wittgenstein draped in angelic white, like sisters at a ball, waiting to dance.

  The label beneath Adele’s portrait says only “Lady in Gold—Gustav Klimt.” No one knows anything about the Bloch-Bauers or the lady in gold; no one asks her name.

  ADELE

  1923

  By law, everything I had belonged to Ferdinand. But he encouraged me to write a will, and so I did.

  I was only forty-two years old, and did not make a fuss of it by involving our attorney and so on. I sat at my desk, picked a smooth sheet of linen paper, dipped my quill in the ink, and began. I asked for my jewels to be divided among the nieces and nephews, a portion of my estate to be donated to the children’s hospital, and the remaining assets to be dispensed to Ferdinand.

  My two portraits and four landscapes by Gustav Klimt, I kindly request my husband bequeath to the Belvedere National Gallery after his death, I wrote. Because I could not rightfully and legally bequeath what I did not own, I considered those words carefully and made my wishes as clear as possible. I wanted what I was creating with my own courage and vision to be remembered and honored.

  When I finished the will, I signed, dated, and sealed it, sent a copy to our attorney on Schwindgasse, and did not think of it again. I was busier than ever with the business of social reform,
reading about the Palestinian territory, and shaping the expansion of the Belvedere’s modern collection. Every Saturday, Julius Tandler, Karl Renner, Berta, Alma, and the others came to Elisabethstrasse to discuss social issues. We talked about Jerusalem, the importance of bringing books and art to everyone (even the poor, especially the poor), and the vast public health program that Renner and Tandler were advancing through the city’s health council.

  So I was surprised and disappointed when my friend Tandler, who had asked for my support in building the library for unwed mothers, objected to some of the books I sent to fill the shelves.

  “They’re working women—the city’s poorest prostitutes and ragpickers,” Julius said when I mentioned a crate of philosophy books. “They do not need Goethe.”

  “But they do—”

  “No. We need the shtetl Jews and poor barmaids to avoid childbearing.”

  He was angry, but so was I. He’d begun using the health system to sterilize the city’s poorest women, and while I might once have encouraged a program that prevented the lowest people from breeding, I could not condone anything that would deny a woman the joys of motherhood, or make her suffer as I had. I had truly begun to understand what my brother had told me: that beneath the skin, we are all the same.

  “You showed me how to be humane in regard to all women, and now you want me to endorse something with which I cannot agree,” I said.

  We argued, and I accused him of elitism.

  “And you are a member of the elite,” he said, eyes blazing. “Reforming a society requires resources—and it requires that we not waste them on women and children who cannot carry the best aspects of the Viennese spirit forward.”