Love by the Morning Star

by Laura L. Sullivan

  “Traudl, could it be you? Oh no, it couldn’t, really, never in that outfit.” Hannah’s mobile face incandesced into joy. She took her friend by the arms. “What do they call this?” She rubbed the rough black fabric between her finger and thumb.

  “Linsey-woolsey,” Waltraud said with an exaggerated English accent, then switched immediately back to German. “Isn’t it a scream?”

  “I hardly knew you without silk and sequins. How on earth did you get here?”

  “Oh, Liebchen, it was terrible. I had to sell all my costume jewelry to that horrid Bavarian hen, and my only consolation is that she can’t tell glass from diamonds. Still, they were all such pretty baubles, and now they adorn her fat neck. Do you know she took a Nazi lover? Perhaps he will strangle her with my faux sapphires one day. One must always look on the bright side, no? I got just enough for all the bribes and there I was, on a train at the border, absolutely penniless but with one very valuable piece of paper giving me permission to work here in England. Then—oh, Hannah, how it shames me to tell you!”

  “As if anything could shame you, Traudl,” Hannah said with an impish grin. Waltraud had never shunned a dare, never followed a law if it did not please her, rarely bothered to determine the gender of a pretty lover before turning off the lights.

  “Wait until you hear this, though. All my money was gone, and there, at the very border, a guard demanded one more bribe. ‘But I’m broke,’ I protested. He claimed a woman always has a way to pay. My dear, do you think I clawed his eyes out? Do you think I ripped off his little counterfeit family jewels so those baubles could replace the ones I sold?”

  If she had, Hannah knew she would never have made it to England. She’d be in Buchenwald. Still, she could not imagine her friend yielding to coercion what she loved to give so freely.

  “I did not. I reminded him that I am Jewish and it would be a crime for he, an Aryan, to, ahem, collect that particular sort of bribe from me. However—and this is the shameful part, Liebchen—there was in my train car a horrid personage of about sixty, an aunt or governess in charge of a gaggle of children, who had spent the entire ride lecturing her brood about the unnatural vileness of the Semitic people. You know her sort. I’m afraid I told the guard that she was of our party, a full-blooded Aryan turncoat smuggling out Jewish children, and she would be more than happy to pay our bribe.”

  “You never!” Hannah gasped.

  Waltraud shrugged her shapely shoulders. “You would not believe a sixty-year-old woman could slap a strapping guard so hard he’d fall on his derrière. In the confusion I found another car with a kinder guard and went on my merry way. And la, here I am, cleaning fireplaces in blue in the morning, changing to black in the evening to fluff pillows and stalk those delicious young footmen in their dandified uniforms. There is a quite pretty chambermaid here too, with lava-colored hair and freckles like little red ants crawling all over her face, but it seems English girls have never heard of Sappho. Pity. But what are you doing here in the kitchen? I’m to find the new kitchen drudge and show her to her room. Have you seen her?”

  Hannah gave a hysterical hiccup of a laugh. “It is I!”

  “You? But I thought you were the prodigal third cousin once removed, come home for the fatted calf? Was that just a story you cooked up for customs?”

  “It’s true enough, for all the good it has done me. Perhaps if I’d cooked up a better story, I wouldn’t be here in the kitchen. Could you show me to my room, please? I’m very, very tired.”

  “Tell me everything,” Waltraud said.

  “No, please, just let me endure. I’ll be fine if I don’t have to talk about it. Talking makes me think, and thinking makes me talk more, and if I’m not careful I’ll storm up to Lord Liripip’s bedroom and kick him in his gouty leg. And I promised Mother and Father that I would come here and be safe, and surely they would send me away if I kicked Lord Liripip, so I must not even let a thought of the vast unfairness of it all creep into my mind.”

  But of course she told Waltraud everything.

  “I shall put sticks of strychnine trees in their fireplaces!” Waltraud swore, pounding her thigh with her fist. “I shall put pins in their pillows!”

  “No, you mustn’t, or we’ll both be banished from Starkers.”

  “Let them banish us! We will form our own act, the angel and the devil, the lamb and the serpent. We would have all the laureled heads of England eating from our hands. Come, doesn’t the stage call you?” She grabbed Hannah in her strong arms and dipped her, as she had once dipped Otto.

  “England is our sanctuary,” Hannah said between giggles as she regained her balance, “and Starkers is where we must stay until it is safe to go home. You know you won’t be allowed to stay in the country without a job.”

  “I don’t know why you are putting up with it so calmly, Liebchen. You have an iron core of pride in you. All of you opera singers do, I think. It helps a little thing like you resonate up onstage.” She kissed her friend’s cheek. “But don’t let pride and stubbornness keep you from happiness. Seek out Lord Liripip. His wife is a fright, but he can’t be as bad as all that. Kneel at his feet, put your head in his lap, sigh prettily . . . believe me, it is a strategy women have been using with men for centuries, whatever their relation. Ah, scheise! I am to lay the napkins out for lunch. After the masters eat, we underlings get our nibble, so I will see you soon downstairs. Your frocks are over there, you poor thing. They’re worse than mine.”

  She clicked her heels, gave a martial bow, and marched down the narrow staircase.

  Alone, Hannah sat down gingerly on the dirt-colored blanket that served as a bedspread, half expecting dust to puff up around her. But no, it was perfectly clean, only so, so ugly. “It was dyed this color,” she murmured, patting the blanket as she would a pug puppy who couldn’t help being born unattractive. “If they were going to go to the trouble of dyeing it, why wouldn’t they make it scarlet, or plum, or anything other than dirt-colored?”

  Besides the bed there was a three-drawered dresser, a tipsy chair with an enamel coating that had worn off in places to reveal rusting wrought iron, a rag rug, a mirror just big enough to reflect one cheek, and for decoration, a mockery of a painting: a garish pink-cheeked servant in a crisp white apron and cap skipping through a pastoral landscape as if she’d never done a day’s work in her life.

  Two dresses hung from hooks on the wall.

  “They’re not hideous at all,” she told herself gamely. Perhaps they had even been pretty, once. The blue floral one might have looked like Delft china . . . three or four owners ago. The pink floral gave a vague impression of spattered blood that had been scrubbed and scrubbed but had never quite come out.

  She stood and crossed the room—it took only a step—and opened the dresser. The top two drawers were empty. The bottom drawer had mouse droppings in it.

  “No underthings,” she said to herself.

  Then she covered her face in her hands and, just for a moment, blotted out the whole horrid world.

  “I don’t care!” she insisted, throwing out her arms and baring herself to the truth again. “Let them hate me. Let them punish me. Here I was sent and here I stay until my parents come to England.” She looked again at the shoddy ugliness around her. “I wouldn’t care if they were poor. If this were all they had and they took me in with love, I swear I would never make a single squeak of complaint. But to live in a castle, and treat me like this . . .”

  She swallowed hard and knitted her dark brows. “There. That was my last bit of whining. I won’t complain. Not to the Liripips, not to the cook, not even to myself. And I’ll die before I ask them for new underthings. Why was I so stupid at the station? No, never mind, that’s only complaining about myself, and I’m not to complain anymore. Or talk to myself.”

  She made a motion of locking her mouth and throwing away the key. Then, since no one was watching and she could be as silly as she chose, she scrambled on the floor to pick up the imaginary key a
nd slipped it into her pocket, just in case she changed her mind.

  Resolutely, she slipped into the blue print dress. It was miles too long, but she managed to hook it up under her apron so it hung higher, though unevenly. The cap was trickier. No matter how she placed it, it either tipped forward over her eyes or tumbled backward off her head entirely. Finally she spied an old hairpin wedged into a corner on the floor, relic of a kitchen maid past. With that she contrived to secure the cap at a rakish angle so it dipped down over one eye. It was the best she could do.

  Then she carefully stowed the few mementos of her past life. She hung her light coat neatly on one of the hooks, and folded her jacket, and the matching skirt weighted down with strands of pearls sewn into the seams. Beneath them in the top drawer she tucked her mother’s letter from Lady Liripip, and a picture of her parents linked arm in arm on the stage, taking a curtain call. Finally she settled her passport and visa in her lap and looked at the little J stamped on them.

  She had never been religious, and her parents’ only faith was in the stage. Aaron Morgenstern was a member of the local synagogue because his parents had been, because his friends were, because it took his donations and put them toward good deeds. His was a Jewishness of history and culture and sociability, not of faith. Spiritually, he was an atheist. That did not matter to the state.

  “From now on, for the sake of my fellow Jews who are suffering, I will be as Jewish as I can.” Hannah did not speak Hebrew, knew few of the rites, but what she knew, she would practice. “It will be a lie of a sort,” she admitted to herself. “But a good one. A lie of homage. A lie of solidarity.”

  She shoved her cap more firmly on her head and hiked up her trailing hem, determined to do whatever she had to until she could be with her parents again.

  “Though I hope it won’t be too long,” she said as she closed her door behind her. “I don’t know how many washings my one pair of underwear can survive.”

  The family’s lunch was over by the time she descended, and the servants were just sitting down to their own repast. Dozens of pairs of eyes whipped around at her entrance.

  No need to be afraid of them. It’s only a stage, she thought to herself (fortunately remembering not to say it out loud, for once). I am just acting a part. An Aschenputtel part—no, in English it is Cinderella. Only my father will be my prince when he makes it safely to England, and I have a beloved mother instead of an evil stepmother, and . . .

  “Ahem,” she said after a long and uncomfortable silence. “My name is Hannah and I suppose I am . . . no, I am the new kitchen maid. I am also Jewish, and I’m sorry, but I won’t work on a Saturday because it is a holy day. Also, sausages and other pig things are not to have.” In her confusion she was thinking in German and translating to English. Her accent was creeping up on her and she fought it back, her face scrunching with determination. “I am very happy to be here and hope to be your good friend. Oh, and shrimp. I must not eat shrimp. Or camels. Or insects.” She was very hazy on dietary laws, having spent her toddler years wandering among the tables at Der Teufel, sneaking diners’ shrimp cocktails. But it would have to do. She had made her point.

  She bobbed a curtsy because she had seen it in a movie about English servants once. “Thank you.”

  One of the parlor maids tittered, and this started a chain reaction of giggles and guffaws until Sally barked, “Silence!” and told Hannah to sit at the end of the table.

  “You work on Saturday like everyone else. Do your praying Sunday when the rest of us are at church. As for shrimp, my lady,” she added with an echo of Trapp’s withering scorn, “you shan’t be offered them. Eat as many bugs as you like, though. Sup now, and you’ll set out the kitchen table in preparation for dinner afterward. Tomorrow your work begins in earnest.”

  Feeling like a cad, Sally immediately turned to chat with the housekeeper, who usually deigned to eat with them. When one of the kitchen maids served them and Sally saw the chubby, still-sizzling pork sausages she had prepared not ten minutes earlier, she felt a terrible urge to leap up and make Hannah a special omelet all for herself, but she manfully controlled that impulse. Best the girl get used to it now, she thought.

  Hannah, who had dined lightly the night before and breakfasted not at all, almost drooled at the fragrant, fatty smell of sausages. No, she told her salivary glands sternly. People are being persecuted for having Jewish blood. I have never been particularly Jewish, but I will do my best. It is the least I can do.

  She reached for the potatoes and ate them in silence under heavy stares.

  Hannah, Who Tried to Be Helpful

  “I INTEND TO MAKE MYSELF as helpful as possible,” Hannah said after the servants had dispersed to their varied duties and the lunch table was cleared. “I know very little of cookery but I can make a few things. Pfannkuchen, of course. Crepes. No, that is French. I’m sorry, my English sometimes runs away from me here and there. Pancakes!” She laughed. “The word might run but I always catch it. My legs are short, but fast. I do not care for the sweet pfannkuchen so much but rather the ones you eat for a meal, with bits of bacon and cheese and scallions. And when they are in season the plump white asparaguses. Asparageese? No, one asparagus, many asparagus. They are like fish and sheep.”

  Sally could not see at all how asparagus were like fish or sheep, so she only said, “Can you lay out a table for dinner preparation?”

  “I have laid out many tables,” Hannah said, thinking of the napkins she’d coaxed into the shape of swans or crabs or Viking longboats every night at Der Teufel.

  “I’m going to run to the village to get a few ducks. Herself changed her mind and needs roasted mallard tonight, and if I let one of the girls pick them out they’ll take whatever they’re given and never ask how long they’ve hung. Himself won’t eat a duck that’s hung less than a week.” Sally stopped short in her bustling, amazed at her own jibber-jabber. The foreign girl was getting to her. Could it be that Trapp was wrong? Maybe talking didn’t get in the way of an efficiently run kitchen. It felt rather nice.

  “You have the cook’s table set out for me,” Sally went on, “and while the girls and I make dinner you can watch and learn. The most important things are to do what you’re told and stay out of the way. And see Judy or Glenda about a few more hairpins.”

  Sally reached for Hannah, and for one tender instant the girl felt loved as the older woman adjusted the unsightly white construct perched on her head. She caught Sally’s hand. “They won’t say anything, will they? I can bear it. I have to bear it. But they won’t be so unkind as to tease me about it, will they?”

  “What, about where you come from? Who you are? Oh, they’ll tease you without mercy. You just give as good as you get.” As she looked down at the dark-eyed little morsel of a girl, she felt more of Trapp slip away. This is my kitchen now, she thought. I can be kind if I want.

  But when Sally came home with a basketful of perfectly hung ducks she was not inclined to kindness. Hannah, her cap askew again, was standing beside the vast cook’s table with a pleased expression, while Judy and Glenda smirked in the background. “I told you to have my table set up!” Sally thundered. “I have to start dinner now. Not in five minutes, now, for if it’s not ready the instant Lord Liripip sits down, the entire lot of us will be sacked.”

  The table looked very pretty, with its single knife and fork, its slotted spoon and its ladle, its large mixing bowl and its tea towel cleverly rolled into the shape of twins sleeping in a hammock. Dead center, in an empty Bovril bottle, was a cluster of late, bedraggled wild asters cheerfully shedding pollen all over her pristine work surface.

  She rounded on Hannah. “You said you could set a cook’s table. Have you never seen a cook’s table?”

  “I . . . I thought I had. There was a chef, and he . . . well, he drank quite a bit and things were a mess afterward but he did wonders with one knife and a towel.” Then she added, quite unhelpfully but very hopefully, “I can make cocktails.”

 
“Get those things out of my kitchen!” Sally shouted, hurling the flowers toward the scullery. The dinner frenzy was upon her, and like a berserker she snatched up a cleaver and jabbed it in Hannah’s direction. Trapp had rarely been without a weapon. “You, back against the wall and don’t dare make a move unless I tell you to. Glenda, you get my table ready. Judy, get those ducks plucked and scalded. Herself demanded pommes soufflées tonight, and you know what that means.”

  As Hannah was to discover, it meant volcanic eruptions of blistering oil, copious cursing, and in the end, ballooned golden potato fingerlings that were worth the burn wounds they inflicted. Not, Hannah mused from her corner, that the people who suffered to make them got to so much as taste them. Sally tore one potato in half to make sure its innards were properly puffed, then served them. The ducks likewise were prodded for doneness, but not one morsel of crispy fat-backed skin passed the lips of any of the servants. Sally did taste the mushroom consommé, adding a smidge of salt, and nibbled a bit of the warm pear and onion salad, but for the most part, one half of the house cooked and the other half ate.

  Sally had turned into another creature entirely, a focused general doing battle against ingredients and time. Feathers flew, steam made everyone look like damp beets, and no one stopped moving for even an instant. Only Hannah was still, holding up the wall and watching, spellbound, the frenetic activity that, under Sally’s supervision, produced perfection from chaos.

  They’ll chop their fingers off, she thought as she watched the shining blades rise and fall. Judy almost got gutted when Glenda, knife in hand, dashed off for one more pear, and a tall and comely footman in archaic breeches and hose only just managed to avoid being doused with scalding water.

  Somehow it all worked. The table, properly laid out now, had a dozen knives, twenty bowls, spoons of every shape and size, but Sally grabbed what she needed almost without looking. At the precisely right moment, after just the right amount of shouting and tears, threats of firing and vows of quitting, each dish was ready and handed to a footman, who carried it off to that rarefied ether in which the aristocracy dwell. The soup, a delicate sole in tarragon butter, the ducks and their supporting cast of vegetable matter, all left their humble origins to nurture the masters.