A Reunion Of Ghosts: A Novel

by Judith Claire Mitchell

  From time to time she dusts off her old lecture about the chemical properties of household cleansers and delivers it to one of the area’s ladies’ clubs. She no longer travels for these lectures; that’s another benefit of being the director’s wife. The lectures are now held in her own home, in the public parlor on the first floor of the mansion. She doesn’t have the bother of hiring a car, of lugging around her notes and the bottles of ammonia and bleach and scouring powders she uses for purposes of demonstration. She can go upstairs as soon as the house is all hers once again and crawl into Richard’s bed, a wet cloth over her eyes, a glass of wine on his little bedside table. On the other hand, now in addition to updating the lecture, she’s the one who has to prepare the room and the cakes.

  “If you want to know the truth,” she tells Richard in the dark of their shared room, “I think I’ll be giving up the lecturing business. Everyone always assumes your papa writes my talks anyway.” She laughs. “No one ever assumes he also bakes the cakes.”

  Richard, her biggest fan, finds this a riot. His father baking tea cakes. That, he says, is a good one.

  Spring 1914

  Iris Emanuel Alter may hate Dahlem, but Dahlem is quite fond of Iris Emanuel Alter. In fact, Iris is very well liked wherever she lives, wherever she goes. People who know her invariably describe her as nice. It’s true that sometimes they also compare her to rodents, but always to the least repellent of rodents. A bit of a mouse, someone might say, or shy as a rabbit. But they always come back to nice. So very nice. So unfailingly nice.

  Mileva Einstein, for instance. When Iris dies a year from now, Mileva will say, “She was as nervous and high-strung as a squirrel. It makes sense it would be her heart that failed her. Although who among us is so good at love they don’t die a failure in the heart department?” She’ll sigh at her own mot. “But honestly,” she’ll add, “it’s very tragic. She was the nicest person I’ve ever known.”

  But that’s next spring. This spring, Mileva and her boys are living with the Alters while Albert endeavors to sort out his love life and Lenz acts as a go-between. Albert wants to leave Mileva for his cousin, Elsa. Lenz refuses to allow it. “What can I tell you?” Lenz says to Albert. “I’m modern in all respects except when it comes to divorce. Have an assignation, fine, but you can’t actually move away from your children.”

  In Lenz’s opinion, everything is now proceeding apace. “Has Albert agreed to stop seeing her?” Mileva asks when he returns from dinner and negotiations. “Well, no,” Lenz says, “but he tells me he misses the boys. So that’s an encouraging sign.”

  Mileva is weepy and maudlin, but extremely grateful to both Lenz and Iris. She expresses this gratitude incessantly. “It’s so nice of you to take us in like this,” she says multiple times a day. She calls the white mansion her beautiful asylum.

  Being thanked excessively is just another chore, Iris has come to realize. Every day she has to stop what she’s doing or put off what she’d like to begin doing to reassure Mileva that she’s a welcome addition to Iris’s daily life. “Please, don’t mention it,” Iris says, but Mileva mentions it again, then again.

  Another reason to dread Mileva’s expressions of gratitude is that too often they’re followed by her own attempts to be gracious. “I want you to know,” she says, lowering her voice, “that if you ever need a similar favor, our door will always be open to you.” Our door. As if the future is certain, as if Mileva hasn’t a doubt in the world that she and Albert will soon be reunited, at which point she can devote herself to spackling over the cracks in the Alters’ own marriage.

  The worst part about Mileva’s invitation is that Iris can easily imagine having to take her up on it. She can see herself walking through Mileva’s door after Lenz finally—inevitably—meets a woman for whom he overcomes his distaste for divorce. She sees herself carrying suitcases, hers and Richard’s. She sees herself sending Richard upstairs to play with the Einstein boys, sees herself standing in the Einsteins’ parlor, feeling lost or, even worse, crying.

  “Our house is your house,” they say. “Stay as long as you need to.” The same things she’s told Mileva.

  Iris has been in the Einsteins’ house many times. Like Albert, it’s always disheveled. The settee in the parlor is always busy with toys and papers, a plate or two in need of washing, several lozenges of unwrapped sucking candy that have been partially sucked. In her grim fantasy it’s Albert who clears a spot on that settee so Iris can sit, Albert who pats Iris’s hand and mumbles words of comfort, while Mileva hurries to the kitchen to brew tea. Even in this imaginary scenario Iris is too embarrassed to ask for whisky.

  She has to play it through her mind only once. She’d rather kill Lenz than move in with the Einsteins. Or kill herself. Or perhaps carry out one of those murder/suicides one is always reading about.

  But no—she doesn’t mean it. She won’t harm Lenz. Not even when he tries to kiss her and her body shivers not with desire, but with the urge to claw at him with her fingernails. Even then all she does is make a plausible excuse—that torte in the oven, the bath she needs to run for Richard—and hurry away. She isn’t violent. She wholly rejects violence. When she daydreams about killing Lenz, she’s only being self-indulgent, melodramatic. She’ll never let Lenz drive her to such clichéd behavior. She has too much pride, too much education, to play the role of vengeful wife. She doesn’t want to go down in history as Frau Doktor Hell Hath No Fury.

  She holds her head up. She behaves as if all is well. She throws his parties. She waves and cheers from reviewing stands. She’s not the first woman in this world to find herself married to a famous man who’s unfaithful. There are worse things in this life.

  She’s tried to explain all this to Mileva. If Albert refuses to accept conventional understanding of the laws pertaining to time and space, why would Mileva expect him to accept conventional understandings pertaining to domestic life?

  She means for Mileva to smile ruefully—the rueful smile is Iris’s specialty—but Mileva, still a Serbian peasant at heart, finds Iris’s philosophy shocking. “Are you saying there’s no such thing as a man who is both a genius and a decent human being?”

  Is that what she’s saying? Yes, she concludes, that’s what she’s saying. “Can you think of any?” she asks.

  “What about your Lehrer?”

  If Iris weren’t such a nice person, she would get up and leave the room. Who is Mileva to mention Lehrer to her? But polite as always, she does nothing but answer the question. “It’s true that Lehrer was devoted to Marthe,” she says evenly, “and that Marthe was equally devoted to him. And, yes, he was unquestionably superb in his field. And, yes, so good to his students, Lord knows. But even I wouldn’t say he was a genius. Not the way Albert and Lenz are.”

  “The problem,” Mileva says, “is that I didn’t know Albert was a genius when I married him. I thought he was brilliant, but brilliant I could keep up with. It was when he crossed into the land of genius that it all fell apart.”

  In addition to unfaithful geniuses for husbands, Iris and Mileva have one other thing in common: Mileva is a scientist too. That’s where she met Albert, in school, in Zurich, the only woman in the class, although sadly, and unlike Iris, she never managed to pass her exams. But what difference does it make, that Iris has a diploma framed and hung on the wall of her writing room, while Mileva doesn’t? Neither works in her field. Each tends house and raises children and entertains guests.

  Iris has lately found herself making lists in her head. One of them she calls “Things Mileva and I Have in Common.” On it go sons, science, and husbands. The other list is called “Things People Might Say I Have Over Mileva.” That list includes Iris’s German birth, her larger home, her superior housekeeping skills, her relative equanimity when it comes to Lenz’s dalliances, and her framed degree, useless though the latter may be. Also, Iris, with her small, unassertive features, is prettier.

  Although this last item is not much of an achievement. If t
he first word people use to describe Iris is nice, the first word they use to describe Mileva is ugly.

  “Uncommonly ugly,” Albert has said to Lenz.

  Iris, engulfed in her Reformkleid, feels guilty about including physical appearance on the list. She feels guilty keeping the list at all. And yet daily she adds new items.

  On her first night at the beautiful asylum, when she came across Iris’s diploma hung on the wall of Iris’s writing room, Mileva cried, “Ah! There it is in all its glory.”

  “Yes,” Iris said. “There it is. A piece of paper under a piece of glass.”

  Mileva advanced, as if to take her by the shoulders. Iris took a step back. “You should be proud of it,” Mileva said, without retreating. “You fought for it and you earned it.” And when Iris said nothing, Mileva said, “I never got mine because I had no one wanting me to succeed. You had your extraordinary friendship with Lehrer, may he rest in peace.” That was the first time Mileva wedged his name into a conversation.

  Iris could see her houseguest’s profile, the short nose, nostrils permanently flared, the high Slavic cheekbones and small angry eyes, the thin smear of mouth.

  “Yes,” Iris said. “Lehrer and I had a lovely professional friendship. Had. Past tense.” This is a bad habit of hers. She says things to make people feel contrite; then, when it works, she feels worse than they do.

  “I’m so sorry,” Mileva said, though she didn’t sound sorry, or at least not sufficiently sorry. “It was so very tragic. He was so young. I never used to think one’s forties were young, but now that I’m thirty-eight . . . well. And to die that way, by fire.” She shuddered, her shoulders by her ears like vulture wings. “I wouldn’t wish it even on . . . No. I won’t say her name.”

  This was Mileva’s bad habit: she never quit while she was ahead. “And to die so stupidly,” she continued. “That was the worst part of it. Such a waste. You ask yourself: How can a man so smart be so stupid?”

  So here’s one more thing Iris has over Mileva. Iris is not as provincial, not as conventional. She doesn’t place long life above everything else. Better to live a daring but short life. Better to chase pleasure, have adventures, fight to make dreams come true. What is it, she wonders, that the world finds so charming about old age?

  Over the course of Mileva’s visit Iris has sometimes tried to populate a third list: “Things Mileva Has Over Me.” It’s been a noble but ultimately impossible endeavor.

  There’s Mileva’s relative youth—Iris is about to turn forty-three—but that’s just an accident of birth.

  There’s the fact that Mileva has two sons to Iris’s one. But Iris’s Richard is worth twice Hans Einstein when it comes to temperament, intelligence, character—of course Richard is two years older; it’s only fair to take that into consideration when comparing the pair—and as for Eduard, you can’t really judge him at this point. He’s three-going-on-four, still too much a baby for anyone to guess who he’ll someday be. Too much a miserable baby, a crier, a bad sleeper, a fussy eater. Always the runny nose and the penchant for half-eaten sticky candy.

  There’s another item that might go on the pro-Mileva list, and that’s the fact that Albert turned out to be the more brilliant and famous of their husbands. The ne’er-do-well clerk from Zurich, the wounded bird Lenz took under his wing: it’s still hard to believe he’s the one flying higher. But, as Iris keeps trying to explain to Mileva, husbands like Albert and Lenz can be as much a curse as they are a blessing, which means that in some ways Iris is the better off in this category too. The greater the genius, the worse the marriage, and so, in the end, she declares this item a wash. She puts it on no list at all.

  This means the list in Mileva’s favor has no entries on it whatsoever. Whereas the pro-Iris list is getting so long that, when she tries to go through it in her head, she’s always forgetting one of its many items. It was a full week, for example, before Iris recalled the baby Mileva and Albert had a couple of years before they married. Mileva, back in Serbia with her unsympathetic parents, birthed it alone, and when she returned to Zurich, she returned alone. Adoption? An institution? A shallow grave? It’s never talked about, although Iris once asked Lenz what had happened to the child. “As is the case with so many things,” Lenz said, “only God and Albert know.”

  A baby unaccounted for. Certainly this went on the list of things Iris had over Mileva. Of all her faults and sins, Iris had never misplaced a baby.

  It’s June now. In fact, it’s Iris’s birthday. She mentions this to no one. She’s just gotten through two separate parties, one for Hans’s tenth, one for Richard’s twelfth. She doesn’t want to be cajoled into baking yet another cake, cleaning up once again after three messy boys.

  It’s also, as they say, the calm before the storm. In less than a week the archduke will be assassinated, and the events that will lead to the first world war will be triggered. (Pun intended. Pun always intended.) But for now Lenz is in Berlin, sitting on a settee glazed with sugar from Eduard’s discarded candies, drinking whisky from a teacup—the glasses are all in the sink—and talking science with Albert, while Iris and Mileva are an hour away, sitting in the upstairs parlor in the director’s mansion, sipping brandy that has been decanted largely for decorative purposes from crystal snifters that came with the house. Brandy is not what Iris usually drinks. She doesn’t want to be drinking it now. She wants to excuse herself. She wants to get in some gardening while the sun is low, but if she goes to the garden, Mileva will follow and stand over her, talking and weeping and offering gratitude and advice. She doesn’t relish working in a Mileva-shaped shadow.

  “You don’t have to entertain her all day,” Lenz has said. “Just live your life.”

  Iris says she doesn’t see how she can go about her day as if Mileva isn’t there when she is there. “What do you know about it?” she asks. “It’s not as though she’s trailing you wherever you go.”

  “Don’t ask for my opinion if you’re just going to ignore my advice,” Lenz snaps, and Iris hisses, “You’re the one who invited her here. You’re the one who decided only you could negotiate the Great Einsteinian Reconciliation of 1914,” and that sets off what would normally have been one of their screaming fights if Mileva weren’t in the house, but given that she is and given her relative proximity and the porous nature of walls even in fine homes like theirs, they whisper and mutter instead, thereby, Iris notes, proving her point.

  “A little more?” Iris says now, not waiting for an answer, automatically refilling Mileva’s glass and her own. Midday, and once again nothing is getting accomplished. There’s not only the garden. There’s the marketing. There’s the wash. There’s her correspondence. There’s tonight’s dinner—the many courses Lenz has requested but will not come home for, as per usual. At least, she comforts herself, she doesn’t have to bother with cake.

  “Here’s a story about Lehrer,” Iris says. She knows that when she herself brings up his name, it only encourages Mileva to do so at other times, which irks Iris no end. And yet there are times when she needs to talk about him, finds relief in saying his name out loud.

  “Another Doktorvater story,” Mileva murmurs. “You have so many.”

  “This one you’ll find instructive, I think.”

  “I only meant that you were lucky.”

  “I was,” Iris says. “And then I wasn’t.” She takes a sip from her glass before she begins, coating her tongue so the words flow easier. “When I finally realized my situation with Lenz was not going to be what I’d hoped,” she says, “that is, when I realized that when Lenz asked me to be his wife, he actually meant he wanted me to be his wife”—here Iris smiles ruefully, and Mileva laughs outright—“I wrote to Lehrer.”

  She omits the fact that this was hardly unusual, that she wrote to Lehrer every day after she left university, frequently twice a day, that she continues to write to him every day even now, two years after his death. She writes late at night and then, when the ink dries, she folds the ecru shee
ts of stationery, pressing them flat with a heavy crystal inkwell.

  “My letter went something like this,” Iris says. “Dear Herr Professor: It seems as though I’ve married Henry the Eighth. All Alter wants from me is a son and to serve as the hostess of his parties and to look the other way when he’s with this or that woman.”

  “Why doesn’t anyone warn you?” Mileva asks. Her small eyes shine like two black beans after soaking. “Why doesn’t anyone tell you we all wind up married to Henry the Eighth?” She looks at Iris with those wet eyes. Her flared nostrils widen even farther with anger. “Although, what am I saying? Nobody warned me, it’s true, but Lehrer did try to warn you, didn’t he? He asked you not to marry, isn’t that right? I suppose he might have been justified if he’d replied you had no one to blame but yourself.”

  Iris has thought the same thing, though that doesn’t prevent her from resenting Mileva for saying it. All right—the truth is, she hardly minds Lenz’s other women. In some ways they’ve been gifts. But the unexpected exclusion from the lab—that was the surprise, the slap in the face.

  She was angry with Lenz, of course she was. But she reserved her greatest fury for herself. She should have kept her promise, should have said no when Lenz proposed marriage at the electrochemistry conference. In fact, she had said no, hadn’t she? But then she’d changed her mind. Why? She still doesn’t know. The hope that it would lead to a university position—that’s what she’d told herself. Now she finds the younger version of herself suspect and shallow. What had her motives been really? Loneliness? Sexual privation? Drunkenness? Someday, when she wants the answer, she’ll ask Lily. Lily knows everything. So says Lily.

  Mileva is also generous in that way. “You ought to consult Dr. Freud,” she says. She isn’t the first person to make this suggestion. “I was blinded by my love for Albert when I married,” she says, “but you, I think, were blinded by something else.”