The Imperfects

by Amy Meyerson

  “Whatever you need,” Beck tells him.

  “I’ll try that Peter Winkler guy, too.”

  “That would be great.” Beck pretends to be pleased, but she feels as pessimistic about Peter Winkler and his father’s memorabilia as she does the royal archives.

  After breakfast, the Millers take the U to Brigittenau, the Twentieth District where Helen grew up. From Brigittenau they follow the Danube toward Leopoldstadt, where Helen and her mother were relocated. Leopoldstadt has become the hip part of Vienna with vegan ice cream parlors and locally designed clothing boutiques. Jake feels a pang of guilt—this is the part of Vienna he would want to live in while Helen was moved here against her will.

  Day two blends into day three, and Christian has not found the nurse to the last emperor’s children. He did, however, manage to get in touch with Peter Winkler, who seemed only vaguely aware of Beck’s emails. When Christian explained that he was a PhD student studying the Habsburgs, Peter enthusiastically offered access to his father’s files. Together, they made a plan to visit Krems an der Donau on the Millers’ second to last day in Austria. Until then, day three becomes day four, and Christian hasn’t uncovered any documents on Karl and Zita’s nurse. The Millers have not returned to the archives to help him. They have not been able to escape the shape of Helen and Flora’s Vienna grafted onto their own.

  They visit Schönbrunn Palace, the summer residence of the Habsburgs, and tour the few domicile rooms open to the public. Most are Franz Joseph’s quarters, but at the end of the tour, there’s a bathroom that Zita was updating with modern plumbing and a flushing toilet. It wasn’t completed until after the empire fell. Zita never got to use it.

  “Do you think Flora lived here?” Ashley asks her siblings. There’s no way for them to know.

  At the treasury, they wander through dark cool rooms of crown jewels, case upon case of bejeweled swords, crowns, chain mail, and religious iconography. Among these treasures, a few cases are empty. Beck assumes the jewels are on loan. When she asks the guard, he explains that those are the jewels the Habsburgs stole at the fall of the empire. The cases will remain empty until the jewels are returned to the homeland.

  Beck reads the descriptions on each case, searching for the Florentine, until she remembers that the diamond was on display at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, not the treasury. Surely, if the Austrians win the forfeiture case, the Florentine will be returned here, made public with the other Habsburg treasures. Beck walks around the dark rooms of crowns, crosses, and slippers, imagining where, if she were the curator, she would put the Florentine. It would be the premier jewel of the collection, like the Hope Diamond at the Smithsonian, the crown jewels at the Tower of London. Each day, thousands of tourists would come to see the Florentine Diamond. She thinks of Helen’s dresser, now filled with Deborah’s clothes, the space behind it where the Florentine was lodged, seemingly missing. No one, other than Helen, had seen the Florentine in years. No one else will as long as it remains in a safe-deposit box in Federalist Bank in Philadelphia.

  For a moment, Beck hopes the Millers lose their case. Then her phone buzzes with a message from Christian.

  I found Flora.

  * * *

  “Ah, Beck’s sister,” Viktor says when he finds Deborah in the hall outside his apartment. He holds out his signature flute of bubbly.

  “Do you greet all your guests with champagne or just me and my daughter?”

  “So Beck really is your daughter?” he exclaims with mock surprise. “Come, I have good news for you.”

  Deborah follows Viktor into the living room where a manila envelope rests on the glass coffee table.

  “It took a while, but eventually I located the right catalog.” Viktor reaches into the envelope and pulls out a glossy black-and-white magazine that says Brand Name and Trademark Guide, 1956. He flips through and stops on the S brands, where he points to SJ. The company’s name is printed below: Spiegel’s Jewelers.

  “This is the maker’s mark that was on the back of the orchid brooch,” Viktor explains as he lays out black-and-white photos of a modest storefront, Spiegel’s Jewelers etched onto the picture window. “Spiegel’s Jewelers started as a one-man operation on Sansom Street.”

  “So this is who made the brooch?”

  Viktor nods and reaches into the manila envelope for an obituary from the Philadelphia Inquirer, which he hands to Deborah. “Joseph Spiegel set up his business in a tiny office space in 1920 after he immigrated to America. By 1930, he had his own storefront and managed to stay open during the war. He passed away in 1960, then the business was handed down from his son to grandson. Now, it’s called Spiegel and Sons and is on the Main Line, in downtown Wayne.”

  Her heart pounds so intensely she suspects Viktor can hear it thumping. The obituary includes a photo of Joseph Spiegel. Although she hasn’t seen the photograph before, she recognizes his broad forehead, his square jawline, his slender nose so similar to her own.

  The paper falls from her hand to the floor. She leans back, shuts her eyes, and steadies her breath.

  “You okay?” Viktor leans toward her but knows better than to touch her. “Let me get you a glass of water.”

  It seems like Viktor is gone for longer than necessary, and Deborah is grateful for the moments alone. This obituary has stripped her of any lingering doubt. The married man from Helen’s photographs—Joseph Spiegel, not Joseph Klein—was indeed her father. He had a family, a business, a jewelry shop where Helen had the brooch made. Her father had not died in 1953 in Korea when Deborah was one. He died in 1960 in Philadelphia when she was eight and could have known him.

  Deborah reaches down to retrieve the obituary. A heart attack, at age sixty-four, survived by his wife and two children. The obituary says nothing of a third child nor the mistress who bore her. As she scans the article, Deborah remembers that, in the late ’50s, Helen cut her hair into a bouffant. She maintained the hairdo through the ’60s until her mane turned white. Then Helen let it grow past her shoulders and started wearing it in a braided crown, her signature hairstyle until her death. In the photographs Helen had kept of her and Joseph picnicking, dancing, dining hand in hand, Helen didn’t have the bouffant. The fact that she had no photographs from the bouffant era didn’t necessarily mean Helen had stopped seeing him, but it marked a change in their relationship from one that was memorialized in photographs to something more furtive.

  Viktor returns with a glass of water. Its coldness soothes her throat. She finishes the glass and rests it beside the obituary. Her eyes skim the newspaper, returning to that same thought: 1960, eight years old, she could have known her father. Helen didn’t want her to have a relationship with him. Then in the third paragraph she sees a detail she’d overlooked: Before immigrating to America, Spiegel was the timekeeper to the last emperor of Austria.

  “He knew the emperor?”

  Viktor’s eyes flit across the text. “Quite well, I’d suspect. He probably would have been in meetings with the emperor.”

  Suddenly, it’s all too clear. Flora was not the nursemaid. Despite the diamonds they found in Helen’s doll, Helen did not bring the Florentine to America. Joseph Spiegel, royal timekeeper, a man with access to the emperor, must have brought it with him to America. He must have given the Florentine Diamond to Helen. Her children are in Austria, pursuing a false lead that she instigated.

  Deborah looks around the library with its floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, its glass doors that lead to a colonial dining room. Viktor is watching her, likely arriving at the same conclusion she does: this is the story of how Helen got the Florentine Diamond.

  She turns to him. “Why are you helping us?”

  “Your daughter helped me immeasurably a few years ago. I can never repay her, but anything I can do, I’ll try.” He says this so straightforwardly that Deborah struggles to remember why her first instinct was to distrust him.


  “Are you a Scorpio?” He looks confused. “Your sign.”

  “A Taurus. Is that good or bad for me?”

  She tells him about the Taurus, its stubbornness, its creativity. “I thought you were a Scorpio when I first met you,” she confesses, although this means nothing to him.

  “I’m sorry about the trick I played on you, with the diamond guessing game.”

  Deborah shrugs. “I picked the right diamond. It had a calmer energy than the other two.”

  “Well, I suppose I owe you dinner, then.” Viktor is unable to contain his smile and she sees that his teeth, while straight, are not perfect. On the bottom they crowd each other. She fights the urge to run her finger across those crooked teeth. If she tried, she has the feeling he would let her.

  “I suppose you do,” she says.

  * * *

  When the elevator opens on the nineteenth floor, Tyler and Lydia walk casually to the hostess stand, knowing exactly what to do. If Deborah were their age, she would have raced over to the floor-to-ceiling windows and greedily inhaled the view, but her grandchildren are indifferent to the novelty of sky-high dining.

  Viktor is waiting at the table, dressed as he has been the two previous times she’s seen him in a black cashmere turtleneck and khaki pants, seemingly immune to the heat that lingers into September.

  He stands when he sees them approaching, and Deborah is struck by how handsome he is, how unhappy Beck would be if she knew he was smiling at her like that. Ashley gave Deborah a generous budget for watching the kids—one Deborah could have lived off for a month. She could have hired a babysitter, but as long as the children are with her, this isn’t a date. She doesn’t have to tell Beck.

  Viktor has already ordered chicken fingers and French fries, which arrive as soon as Deborah and the children sit. As Viktor watches the kids eat, Deborah catches a glimmer in his eye, perhaps envy. Something about that look tells her Viktor has no children in his life.

  When he pours her a glass of champagne, she asks, “Is that the only thing you drink?”

  He laughs. “What else would I have?”

  Deborah motions to the waiter and orders two Rob Roys. “I always like something stronger on a first date.”

  “This is a date, then?” he asks, and it takes her a moment to realize he’s teasing.

  Viktor really doesn’t drink anything besides bubbly, and the effects of the rye are instantaneous. Shoulders relaxing, he tells her about his apprenticeship on Jewelers’ Row, how it was the old-style European way of learning the trade, starting with a broom and ending with a blowtorch. When he begins to talk about diamonds, the children grow interested.

  “My mom has a diamond,” Tyler tells Viktor. “Dad gave it to her.”

  As he asks the children if they know how diamonds are formed, the waiter drops off their entrées. Viktor requests four pieces of paper and crayons.

  “First, I want you to draw a volcano,” he instructs. Eager students, Lydia and Tyler draw ragged-topped mountains. Tyler’s spews hot green lava.

  “Lava isn’t green, dummy,” Lydia says.

  “You’re right,” Viktor says, prompting a smug look from Lydia. “But Tyler is right, too.” Tyler sticks his tongue at his sister. Deborah debates admonishing the children, then decides their bickering is healthy. They shouldn’t be taught to always get along. “If a volcano has olivine in it, it will rain tiny green gems. In fact, this is what happens with diamonds.”

  Together, they sketch the earth’s mantle beneath the volcano, and Viktor documents the diamond’s journey from the diamond stability zones to the earth’s surface. Deborah feels a smile spread across her face as Viktor tells the children to ball up the paper into asteroids and throw it at the table. Tyler aims his at the darkening puddle of ketchup on his plate.

  “Why do you always have to be so gross,” Lydia says as Tyler smooshes the paper into the ketchup. When he picks it up, the paper asteroid has left indentations in the puddle, and Viktor, ever the elegant mediator, agrees that while ketchup might not be the most hygienic of samples, the markings the paper-asteroid left in the ketchup are like the scars real asteroids etched into the surface of the earth. He points to the crevices in the ketchup. “Diamonds can be made in those indentations. The impact is hot enough to create the right conditions.”

  The science lesson is quickly replaced by ice cream headaches and sugar crashes, and Deborah sees the signs of a meltdown across Tyler’s yawning face.

  “I’d better get them back,” she says. Viktor insists on walking them to the garage and paying for her parking. With the Red Rabbit in sight, Deborah is embarrassed suddenly by the rust stains on her car’s hood, the dents and scratches on the bumpers.

  As she is about to apologize, he says, “I had a Rabbit in the ’70s. It was my favorite car.”

  The children file into the backseat and Deborah feels a tightness in her chest as Viktor comes close, then closer. At the last moment, he kisses her on the cheek, and her stomach drops with disappointment.

  “Your grandchildren are delightful,” he tells her as he opens the driver’s side door.

  “I’m afraid I can’t take much credit for that.”

  He closes the door behind her, taps the hood of the car as a parting gesture. He doesn’t tell her that he had a nice time or that he’ll see her soon. He mentions nothing about the maker’s mark. He doesn’t ask her if she’s told Beck about Joseph Spiegel, his access to the emperor. She pulls onto the street, winding her way toward I-76. First Chester, now Viktor. Has she lost her touch?

  The following morning, a bouquet of wildflowers appears on the porch, fashioned with a piece of twine. Not a rose or lily in sight, just delphinium, blue thistle, snapdragon, daffodils, and chamomile—of course Deborah can name them all—with a white card that simply reads V. in navy calligraphy.

  “Who gave you weeds?” Tyler asks, finding his grandmother standing in the open doorway. By the time she turns to answer, he has disappeared into the kitchen, opening and closing all of the cupboards, concocting a game out of Helen’s dishware.

  “You break it, you buy it,” she calls to Tyler, rushing into the kitchen before any bowls find their way to the unforgiving floor. It’s only hours later, once the wildflowers have been placed in a vase and Deborah is hustling the children out of the house for an afternoon in Old City, that she realizes she never told Viktor where she lives.

  * * *

  Although Deborah had promised to email Beck as soon as she spoke to Viktor, she doesn’t write her daughter. It’s still too raw, this news of Joseph Spiegel, her father, likely the real diamond thief. She’s not ready to accept any of it. As long as she doesn’t check in with her daughter, Beck won’t have to know that she’s seeing Viktor, either. Besides, it’s not like Beck has written her.

  Over pasta at Vetri, Deborah tells Viktor about Flora. Since the wildflowers arrived, they’ve gone to the Academy of Natural Science with the children, but this is their first one-on-one date. Deborah uses some of the funds Ashley left to hire a babysitter. She insists on meeting Viktor at the restaurant, despite his offer to pick her up. This thing with Viktor, she wants to take it slow, something she’s never done before, not even with Kenny.

  Viktor agrees that she was right not to say anything to her children. “They’re already in Vienna. Besides, who knows? Your theory on Flora may turn out to be right.” He doesn’t tell her it was crazy to assume from one small detail—red hair—that this mysterious nursemaid might have been her grandmother, even though she’s been berating herself ever since she found out about Joseph Spiegel. “Stranger things have happened.”

  “It wasn’t Flora,” she tells him. “It was Joseph.”

  “Either way, it can’t hurt to stop by Spiegel and Sons to see if they have any paperwork on Helen’s brooch,” Viktor suggests. “Family businesses like that, they tend to keep meticulous records. I
f Helen brought the diamond for him to set, there’s probably a record of it. Then you’d know whether or not he gave it to her.”

  “I can’t go there,” Deborah admits. “It’s complicated.”

  It gives her whiplash, how quickly she takes him as a confidant. She tells Viktor about the photographs she found of Helen and Joseph, of herself on his knee when she was a baby, of her birth certificate with the father’s name left blank. She can’t recall the last time she’s spoken at such length, talking through the entrée and dessert courses.

  “Assuming Joseph is your father, it may have been his decision to leave his name off your birth certificate,” Viktor says. “As a single woman, Helen would have had to get a signed agreement from him, acknowledging paternity. If he was married, he might not have wanted to do that. Or she may have been trying to protect you. If he was on the birth certificate, he could have fought for custody, tried to take you away.”

  That would have been terrifying to Helen. She would have done anything not to lose her daughter.

  Viktor places his hand on Deborah’s. His skin is warm. “You okay?”

  “I’ve been so busy thinking she betrayed me I didn’t stop to consider that she may have been protecting me.”

  “It’s funny how similar they seem, betrayal and protection.”

  Deborah casts him a funny look. She doesn’t quite understand what he means. Then again, she knows little about him.

  “I’ve been talking too much. I want to know more about you.” Deborah coats you with innuendo, rubbing his arm.

  Viktor downs a glass of red wine, forgoing his signature bubbly when she mentioned that she prefers a bold Italian red. Already, she’s changing him. He explains how his career evolved from apprenticing with a jeweler to getting certified by the International Gemology Society to designing for Tiffany’s to his side gig of fabricating knockoff engagement rings, which was how he met Beck.