by John Jakes
The detectives threw him in the chair and yelled their questions. Did he have a criminal record? Did he belong to socialist or anarchist cells? Did he have clap? A history of kidnapping and raping young women? No matter how he responded—denial, or what passed for a scornful laugh—it didn’t satisfy them. He took blow after blow of the shot-loaded sock.
His skin gushed sweat. He felt that every ounce of fluid in his body must be boiling away. The detectives didn’t seem to mind the heat.
For perhaps the thirtieth time he denied the kidnapping charge. Before the detective could hit him again, someone banged loudly on the door.
Annoyed, the older detective said, “Keep your pants on out there. Hal, get that.”
The door creaked. Then:
“Ease off, boys. This one’s bailed out. Clean him up and bring him downstairs.”
The lawyer was a natty little fellow in a derby and velvet-collared overcoat. Paul wondered why he wore the coat in warm weather. The lawyer’s name was Kaspar Gross. He took charge downstairs, showing Paul where to sign the various papers. Then he shook Paul’s hand vigorously and congratulated him, as if it were some great honor to be released from Cook County Jail.
Paul was still barefoot, though he’d been allowed to keep his coarse gray prison shirt and pants. He lurched down granite stairs into a courtyard. Above it, an opalescent square of sky boiled with thunderclouds. In the center of the yard was the Crown landau with the top raised.
“Glad you’re safe,” Nicky Speers called down from his seat. “Better climb in, it’s starting to rain.” Heavy drops began to plop in standing water. Paul opened the carriage door to discover his uncle seated with both hands resting on the silver head of a cane.
Uncle Joe’s face was unreadable. Paul dropped onto the leather seat opposite him and pulled the door shut. Uncle Joe rapped the cane on the floor and the carriage swung out of the courtyard into Dearborn Street as the rain came down.
“I will take you home before I go to the brewery,” Uncle Joe said in a husky voice, as if he were trying to rein in enormous anger. “You smell like a sewer.”
“That’s what it is in there, a sewer.”
“Vanderhoff lost no time in informing me of what you did. He tried to reach me yesterday but I was in Milwaukee on business. He telephoned me at home after midnight. Fortunately I was downstairs, and your aunt was sound asleep when the call came. I couldn’t locate the attorney until this morning.”
“I am still very grateful.”
The statement made no visible impression. “Is that dried blood in your hair? Did they abuse you?”
“They questioned me hard. I will be all right. If you will only listen to my side, Uncle—”
“Go ahead.”
“Juliette asked me to meet her at that little hotel in the country. I love her. She loves me.”
“That’s completely immaterial.” Paul was terrified of his uncle’s cold voice. It was more like a judge’s than that of a blood relative. “Vanderhoff agreed to drop charges in return for a pledge of silence from our family. A criminal action against you would result in a trial, and the press loves nothing better than a courtroom circus involving prominent people. Vanderhoff desperately wants to avoid that. I don’t want a scandal either. We didn’t have to bargain long. Vanderhoff did require one additional condition. That you never again see or communicate with his daughter.”
“I can’t give that kind of promise.”
“It isn’t necessary that you do. I gave it for you.”
“Uncle—!”
“Kindly keep quiet. Your aunt has suffered quite enough lately, I won’t tell her the truth about this shameful affair, and neither will you. Here is our story. You were loitering in a tavern on Saturday night. You drank too much beer, got into an argument, and the police were summoned. You refused to leave the tavern peaceably so the police used force. Hence your bruises. You were detained in jail until Kaspar Gross got you out. There, you’ve made liars of both of us.”
“But the explanation is good. I don’t want Aunt Ilsa to think badly of me.”
“Think badly? You helped our son run away. Don’t ask for miracles.”
Paul wiped the back of his hand across his lips. “Will she believe the story?”
“I think so. She is convinced that alcohol affects people adversely. The older she gets, the more she hates drinking, even drinking beer. It’s better that she think you got drunk, she can accept that. She’d die if she knew you violated an innocent young woman.”
Paul slumped in the corner. After all the sweating, he was cold. Uncle Joe gazed out of the landau at the rainy morning, the inevitable traffic clog of horsecars, drays, private vehicles. “I don’t know what’s become of this family, everything is crashing down about us. At supper the very night you were away with Vanderhoff’s daughter, Frederica brazenly announced her intention of becoming an actress.”
Frederica. He never used Cousin Fritzi’s full name.
“An actress—can you imagine? She is thirteen years old! How could I explain to a girl her age that actresses are regarded as harlots? I simply said she would do no such thing. She disputed that, strongly and vociferously. Thirteen years of age, well bred, and she disputed her father. She said if I objected, she’d do what Joe Junior did. Leave.”
He shook his head, as though burdened beyond the limits of his strength. The rain hammered the carriage top. “Crashing down,” he murmured again. “My son ran away with your connivance. You dishonor the family with your immoral behavior—”
“Uncle Joe, it isn’t immoral, we love each other. We want to marry.”
“Spare me, Paul, the idea’s preposterous. The age of majority in this country is twenty-one. Until you reach that, you can’t marry without consent. Furthermore, you don’t have the slightest appreciation of the meaning of the word ‘love.’ You don’t know the responsibility it demands. Or the respect. That is clear from your sordid behavior.
“By all that you’ve done this week, you force me to a painful decision. You will pack your belongings and leave our house. Please do so before I return home tonight. Your job at Crown’s no longer exists. Henceforth you will have to make your way on your own.”
“But I don’t have any place to—”
“You have acted very independently up till now. You have lived on the streets of Berlin. Crossed this country from New York to Chicago alone. I have every confidence that you can take care of yourself. Find a place.”
Uncle Joe sounded like a different man. Bitter; cruel. Paul’s vision was momentarily blinded by tears.
“Uncle Joe, I can’t believe—”
Uncle Joe struck the carriage floor with the ferrule of his cane. “You had better believe me, Paul. The decision is made.”
Paul shut his eyes and leaned into the corner, trying to hide how heartsick he was. His uncle didn’t look at him for the duration of the trip to Michigan Avenue. “Around to the back, Nicky,” he called as they arrived.
There Paul opened the door and climbed out. Huddled in his slicker and oilcloth hat, Nicky Speers flicked the whip over the team. The landau pulled away while the summer shower streaked Paul’s face with rain.
The Crown mansion had the air of a mausoleum. Helga Blenkers told him his aunt had already left for the morning. He stumbled upstairs to his room.
Hour after hour rain poured down from a black sky. The streets were awash. Despite the gloom, the blow Uncle Joe had dealt him, he found himself regaining a little strength. Maybe he’d been through so much, he just couldn’t hurt any more. He bathed, shaved, and stretched out on his bed for a blessed nap.
He awoke about half past one and remembered what he must do. He put on fresh drawers, a shirt, knickerbockers snatched from a closet hanger along with a jacket. He counted his money from the bureau. Three and a half dollars.
In fifteen minutes he packed a selection of clothes in his valise, leaving room for his souvenirs. Pack-rat Pauli. Well, it was true. The board was overflowing
. He could take only the most important things. A paper White Stockings pennant which he carefully rolled around the stick and tucked down into the side of the valise. An engraving of the beautiful Lillian Russell torn from an illustrated weekly folded and slipped inside his English grammar. Though the valise was already bulging, he stuffed in the globe and stand.
He put a rubber band around all of his postal cards except one—the painting of Brauerei Crown with flags flying from its towers. That he ripped in half and threw on the bed.
His fatigue-ringed eyes lingered on the last treasure tacked to the board. The stereopticon view of New York Harbor. He no longer believed its promise as completely as he once had. He thought of leaving it behind.
He wasn’t quite ready to do that. He pulled the tack and held the card a moment, pensive. Then he put it in his pocket.
Aunt Ilsa came rushing in. Her eyes were puffy again. She flung her arms around him.
“Oh, Pauli, Pauli, how can this happen? He telephoned me five minutes after I got home. That was an hour ago. I have been arguing ever since, trying to dissuade him. He’s a good man, don’t doubt it. But he’s angry. Angry and wounded. There have been so many blows in one week—”
“That much I understand.”
“I pleaded with him, I begged as I’ve never begged. Anger is a human failing, it can be forgiven, but this goes too far, that’s what I told him. We do not shun our own family. But he’s just in a fury—” She was sobbing with her hands over her face. “He won’t even—allow you—to stay one more night.”
Paul put his arms around her. She smelled of lilac water. He kissed her cheek. He loved her and always would.
“I must help you find a place for the night—”
“No, I can do that. I’m grown up, Aunt Ilsa.”
“That’s very true, but—”
“I’ve lived on the streets a long time, please don’t worry.” He already had a destination in mind. It had been there the instant he awoke.
She saw on the bed the ripped halves of the brewery postal card. She hugged him again. “Ach, du lieber Himmel. Es tut weh.” There is such pain.
“I will take care of myself, I will be fine.”
“You can’t simply disappear, Pauli. You must let us know where you are. Come back to visit.”
“Of course I will.” Did she really think he would ever step inside his uncle’s house again?
The rain was slackening. It was time to go. He felt a little unsteady as he opened the closet for his corduroy jacket.
He remembered something in his bureau drawer. He slipped into the jacket, opened the drawer, fastened the spotted white ribbon to his lapel with a safety pin.
“Fritzi will want to say goodbye,” Aunt Ilsa said.
“Of course, if I see her.” He didn’t plan to hunt for her; he was anxious to be away from this house of unhappiness. “Goodbye, Aunt Ilsa.”
He kissed her cheek once more, picked up his valise and walked out.
He was not going to crawl out of the dark mansion like a felon. He took a firm hold on his bag and marched down the staircase boldly, even a bit noisily. With a false appearance of confidence, he strode toward the front door; the same door through which he’d tumbled, frozen, starving, but full of hope, so many months ago.
Someone stepped from clotted shadows on the far side of the entrance hall. Manfred. Elegant in a starched white shirt, perfectly creased gray trousers, brilliantly polished shoes, the leather bib apron he wore for morning chores.
“Well, well. Leaving us, I’m told. Back to the potato fields of your homeland?”
“It would please you.”
“That’s true,” Manfred said. “This household is like a fine banquet into which you brought the smell of cabbage soup.”
“Manfred—” Paul drew a breath. “If you were younger by twenty years, I would knock you down.”
Manfred paled and stepped back.
Paul wheeled and went out.
A silver afternoon; a silver sky. Strong light in the west promised better weather, but it was still raining.
He started along the sidewalk, unaware of his disarrayed state. He’d put on the pair of corduroy knickerbockers that had a small rip at the knee. His left sock was falling down over his shoe.
As he reached the corner of Nineteenth, Fritzi came sprinting through the garden, calling his name.
“Paul, don’t leave. This is all Papa’s fault, he’s bad.”
“No he isn’t. Truly.”
“I hate him.”
“Oh, you mustn’t. Promise me.”
She sniffled. “All right.”
“Good. Goodbye.” He stepped off the curbing.
She ran beside him, shoes splashing puddles, throwing mud on her skirt and his bare leg above the drooping sock.
“You can’t go away from us, this is your home.”
He stopped and swung around to look at her.
“I thought so. I came thousands of miles because I believed it. I was wrong. If I have a home at all—which I often doubt—this is not it. I have to look elsewhere.”
“Paul, don’t go, we love you!”
“I love you, Fritzchen.” He flung both arms around his skinny cousin, a crushing hug. He wanted to cry again. The moment passed.
“Goodbye,” he said for the second time.
He hoisted his grip, knocked off a little gob of mud clinging to it. He waved and left her standing by a puddle while the sky wept silver tears.
When he arrived in Little Cheyenne, the sky was growing dark. The storm had burst again, with frequent lightning and thunderclaps. Torrents of rain sluiced through the gutters. Paul hardly noticed how soaked he’d gotten. He hurried past Wampler’s red light hotel to the door of the Temple of Photography.
His knocking fought the rumbling sounds in the sky, the rushing floods in the gutter. He knocked harder. Presently a key rattled. The door opened.
“Mr. Rooney?”
“Who—? Dutch! What a surprise!” He noticed Paul’s valise.
“I have left my other job, sir. I have left my relatives, to make my way on my own. I’m eager to learn the science of photography.”
“And the art, don’t forget the art.”
“Of course. Will you allow me to come in?”
“By all means! This is a joyous moment. You must dry out, you look a perfect mess. Pants ripped, socks falling—”
Paul laughed. “Oh, I always look this way. Not proper for a German, people say. Somehow I can’t help it. Please don’t worry; otherwise I am a good, neat worker.”
Rooney laughed too. “We shall find out.”
Paul stepped over the threshold, certain that he had left one world forever and was entering another, better one. A world in which he might at last find a sense of purpose and belonging, no more der Aussenstehende, the outsider, living by the sufferance of a tyrant. In this new world he’d make the home he longed for. With Julie.
56
Pork
IN OCTOBER THE VANDERHOFFS ARRIVED at Wiesbaden.
It was high season, the fashionable month to take the waters at Germany’s most celebrated health resort. That made no difference to M. P. Vanderhoff III. He was already sick of the tour. They had exhausted themselves ogling the castles along the banks of “Father Rhine.” They had trudged through Goethe’s house in Frankfurt, Baedekers in hand. Now they moved into a three-bedroom suite at a majestic old hotel on the Wilhelmstrasse promenade, hard by the Kurviertel. The cure quarter.
The atmosphere at the spa was elegant and festive. In the spacious rooms of the Kurhaus one might meet and mingle with an international celebrity clientele, on a footing of perfect equality. A maker of vitreous china lavatories from England could chat with an Austrian duke. A New York traction king—or a Chicago sausage maker—could feel at home with a Polish prince. Pork enjoyed this comfortable democracy of the rich and well placed.
But for the most part he found Germany, and all of Europe, too old and therefore too backward. To
o self-consciously quaint. Too—there was no other word for it—foreign.
Not far from the Kurpark, at the Trinkhalle, one found the most famous of Wiesbaden’s twenty-six medicinal hot springs, the Kochbrunnen. Nell and Juliette slept late each morning, but Pork, unable to break old habits, rose before six, dressed, and strolled briskly to the Trinkhalle along linden-lined avenues. He took this walk wearing spats, a silk topper and a Prince Albert with wing collar and four-in-hand.
Punctually at seven the Trinkhalle band began to play martial music. Pork sat at a white iron table within view of the steaming, snorting spring. He tipped lavishly, so one or another of the smartly uniformed attendants could be counted on to rush him his first glass of the medicinal waters. This he quaffed with visible disgust; it was warm, and salty.
At Wiesbaden one always consulted a private physician before starting a health program. Pork’s physician, an austere man named Dr. Stollknecht, ordered Pork to drink four glasses of the damnable water before returning to the hotel for his breakfast of one soft-boiled egg, one bread-stick and black coffee. The regime seemed to be having a beneficial effect on his elimination, but not his disposition. He was sick of starving. He was sick of salty water. He was sick of “Die Wacht am Rhein.” He wanted to go home.
His impatience was exacerbated because he had nothing to do in Wiesbaden. The hotel reading room routinely included two or three people devouring Mr. Hope’s Prisoner of Zenda. Pork wasn’t interested. He never read novels.
He was equally bored by other forms of culture. He dozed through performances at the Royal Opera House, or the Lieder recitals and turgid Schiller dramas to which Nell dragged him.
Most spa clients at Wiesbaden entered into lively discussions of world events. This year the topics were colorfully varied. They included the prospects and character of the new Tsar, Nicholas II; the possible fate of the Jew officer, Captain Dreyfus, accused of selling state secrets in France; the enormous armed might of Japan that was crushing China in the war in the Far East. Since Pork was neither a student of public affairs nor a good conversationalist, he wanted no part of such talk. Instead, after his breakfast, he usually went off by himself to sightsee, allowing a driver to take him where he would in the nearby Taunus Mountains. One day they drove up to the Hill of Nero. There Pork ate a lonesome noon meal at the restaurant, then returned through the dark green forests. So still and primeval were they, so sensuously fragrant with crushed leaves and fecund soil and all the other sweet rotting scents of autumn, that Pork gazed from the moving carriage and imagined himself a creature with horns and goat legs, chasing and rutting on plump German wood nymphs who practiced every sort of delicious indecency—cheerfully.