The Empress of Weehawken: A Novel Read online

  By the time she was just eight years old, Renate was playing the very same pieces. Even I could tell that she played them better. She had started taking lessons but she didn’t have to work at it, her hands made sense of the keyboard as easily as if they were petting a bunny rabbit or playing with a doll. She had, said the teacher, “piano hands”—Carl’s hands.

  Of course I was enchanted by her. But I did not ever let her see that. It is bad for children to be admired. It makes them think too highly of themselves, and that undermines their character. So I supported Carl in his endeavor to show our disapproval. And when I took her little hands in mine and noted how strong they were, how agile, how unlike mine, I was secretly thrilled and I thought, She will become a surgeon like her father. And then I sighed and said, “Why are your hands always dirty?”

  Carl and I worked hard to mold our offspring. We pressed her with an iron routine. We were early to bed and early to rise; at five o’clock we were saying our rosaries, then we had our baths and our humble breakfast, the fried egg quivering on its last bed of buttered toast, Carl’s chauffeur already standing in regalia before the back door of the spit-polished car at six-thirty. He returned for me and Renate, dropping her off at school, and bringing me to the clinic in time for my shift, assisting Carl. The first operation was at 8:00 a.m.

  Carl was happiest in the operating room. He believed in old-fashioned handiwork. But innovation delighted him. He fell in love with the X-ray machine. He never allowed anyone else to handle it, because he felt others did not have the sensibility to understand the new instrument, they treated it fearfully or arrogantly, they never held the plate steadily enough. He trusted only himself to take X-rays, clutching the plate, crooking his thumb over the edge, so that each picture bore an X-ray of his powerful digit, and he never tired of seeing that. God does not like vanity in men! Cancer grew on the X-rayed thumb, traveled up his arm, and, unknown to us, in trace amounts, down to his testes.

  His colleagues advised him to have his entire hand removed. He considered it and concluded that he would rather die. He settled on losing his thumb. That was not all that he lost. After several years of trying for another child, I advised him to look at his little men under the microscope. I sat at home and waited for this court to clarify once and for all the fault question. He returned home with an expression that I could not fathom, his features and his posture stiff, a kind of rigor. Still standing in the entry hall, he stated, “We are monocarps,” his voice already full of a bitter sap.

  It was the only time he ever used a word I didn’t know, usually he was cautious not to offend me. I understood what he meant anyway: no more children. A certain chore removed from our routine. Which continued at noon with lunch—we came home for that.

  The table was set for three, with napkin rings and silverware holders. We sat down shortly before one o’clock. Renate said prayers. We waited in hushed silence. The clock ticked. As the big hand swept finally over the twelve, footsteps drowned out the clock. The cook entered pushing a trolley. The high point of the day began with soup, steaming thick meat and potato stews in the winter, delicate broths in the spring and fall, iced soups in the summer. The tension did not diminish. Many courses followed. I will not itemize them, because even now, the memory stirs up my longing to sit down one more time at that heavenly table. Carl objected to my pleasure. He tried to distract me, stirring up a discussion about that morning’s adventures at the clinic. The spoon was scarcely in my mouth, then he was asking me a question, my impressions of a patient, or a certain decision taken. I always felt crestfallen when lunch was over.

  Immediately, Carl returned to the hospital, where he took care of his postoperative patients and his diagnostics. I admit that I often amused myself in the afternoon. I tossed balls to the dogs in the yard, and Renate and I had, well, we had a good time. I taught her important skills for getting along in life: for instance, how to look extremely stupid. If you are not dumb, then this requires both inventiveness and practice. Crossing your eyes very slightly, so that it is barely noticeable, is an effective tool. I also pointed out techniques to establish hierarchy, such as directing a stare at an annoying person’s midriff, which they find very disconcerting. Most important, I showed her how to remain absolutely serious when your mood is most frivolous. You have to relax your face entirely, starting with your mouth, working upward, just … relax. This expresses decorum. It’s funny how your mood quickly obeys your face. After practicing this, we enjoyed laughing ourselves nearly to death, so that in order to stabilize my blood pressure, we had to eat cookies in my room.

  The cookies. I was growing fatter. I know that my daughter felt ashamed of me. I watched her from my window as she squatted in the garden to poke a slug with a twig. She was mumbling something. I opened the window to overhear her. She had named the slug “Mama.” I paid her back. It was New Year’s Eve. The Christmas tree stood in the corner of the living room. I realized we were alone, Carl had gone upstairs. I let my head droop, my mouth open, my eyes lolled. I looked like I had gone mad. “Mama,” she whispered, the words now full of fear and respect. “Mama, what’s the matter?”

  I said nothing. She began to whimper. “Please, Mama.”

  I replied, “I’ve turned into a slug.”

  She stared. Then: crybaby. I hugged her. I forgave her. After all, she was right, I was fat. But the fatter a face, the prettier it is. Faces matter more than figures, in my opinion.

  But where was I? My daily life. After lunch.

  I saw to the household, which means I managed the servants. I also managed our relatives; I wrote and received letters. If I had nothing else to do, I went to visit Helga.

  Helga Weltecke was my assistant nurse at the hospital, and her husband, Dr. Joseph Weltecke, was the hospital’s second surgeon, so we had a lot in common. The Welteckes could be pleased that they were on such good terms with their superiors. They were cheerfully churchy, the way I liked it, and we always went to mass together. Dr. Weltecke and Dr. Rother shared a love of good cigars and stamp collecting, while Helga and I had in common a keen interest in fruit spirits. We experimented making our own, from large vats of fruit we kept in her basement. After they had fermented for a year, we would assign them either to silver flasks that could be kept in one’s pocket during walks, or to pretty glass decanters that could be kept on one’s dressing table. We felt that raspberry spirits in particular established, with just one nip, a special link to God.

  I returned home in the late afternoons to be there when Carl swung open the door at four o‘clock. He did not remove his coat, but gave a long, low whistle, which summoned the dogs to his feet. Rain or shine, he turned around and went back out with them for a brisk walk. He was a big, vigorous man. The opening door, the whistle, the excited yipping of the dogs, the closing door, summoned me to my window to watch him stride down the road toward the little woods in Leobschütz. When he returned, sweating and happy, we had a nap together. This was Renate’s time at the piano, and we woke up listening to her play. Meanwhile the Help had prepared coffee, and Carl soon retired to the den to read or work on his stamp collection, and for one hour every evening, before dinner, he too practiced the piano. Dinner was at nineteen hours, a light meal hardly worth recounting, Schnittchen of thinly sliced moist black bread, with thick sweet butter, cervelat wurst or hard cheese, followed by a slab of chocolate and perhaps a swallow of fruit spirits, after which the evening prayers were a deeply felt but quick formality before we slipped into bed, always by nine o’clock.

  On Sundays, Carl worked only in emergencies. Then we got up recklessly late, whenever we felt like it, but in time for mass, which we attended without even so much as a drop of coffee. We enjoyed the hunger pangs knowing they were for our Lord, and by choice; the big meals afterward tasted all the better for it. We often broke our fast at the town restaurant, in the company of the Welteckes and their four well-disciplined little boys. Sunday afternoons were reserved for excursions with Renate, either in the form of a l
ong walk or a drive to a nearby sight, and in the evening we invariably had dinner with some members of Carl’s family, the Rothers of Leobschütz.

  The Rothers were not like the Gierlichs. The Rothers were slow-witted, easygoing little people who had never left their tiny spot on the map and yet smiled upon me, the Christian newcomer, and upon the rest of the universe. They did not even think poorly of Jacob, the family thief—he merely puzzled them. In truth, they were so good that they could not identify bad. Take Carl’s sister Else. She looked like a soft, beautiful milk cow, with mellow brown eyes and a lustrous black mane that was hidden by her lustrous black wig, heavens she was pretty, she was the town beauty until I came along. She never had an unkind word to say about anyone, she just gave and gave of herself all day long, and I often felt ashamed in her presence; she would have effortlessly made an Ideal Christian.

  The Rothers lavished attention on each other, and on Renate. My daughter had twelve aunts and uncles, a granny, and twenty-one cousins who called her one of their own. Of course this planted a big question mark into Renate’s brain about her position in the world. Did she belong to their end of society, with the small-town Jewish shopkeepers, or ours? Even worse, by hiring Liesel, I had invited the lowest of the low into Renate’s heart.

  Liesel was sixteen years old when Renate was born. She had already been working for me long enough to trust her with the silverware. She came from Lower Silesia, her German was infested with Polish syntax and vocabulary, and she had a stutter that tore her speech into a hee-haw. I did not think, when I hired her, that I would be listening to her speak much. Apart from her stutter, she made a nice clean impression. She owned two identical pale blue cotton dresses with white belts and round white collars, which she pampered, mending and starching them, covering them with an apron, so they never wore out. In cold weather, she added a white woolen jacket and woolen stockings. I accepted these outfits instead of a uniform. She kept her coarse brown hair up in a tight bun and was passably pretty but for a harelip that had been poorly sewn. Her eyebrows were bushy and obscured her eyes, her features stayed put, they did not register her feelings. I never saw her face look happy or sad. Her posture did the talking for her. In church, she closed her eyes to pray, and held her hands to her nose like a little girl. I believed that most of her emotions were spent in her relationship with God. Although she was tiny, she was very strong. She loved work, couldn’t get enough of it. After working her ten-hour shift, when normal domestics want to have dinner or go to bed, she asked if she could clean the basement or polish the candlesticks. And she never spoke about money, never asked for a raise. She did not have that social resentment common to her class—her people were social democrats, but thank heavens, she had no desire for equality. “Order rules here,” she liked to say. Hier herrscht Ordnung. Later, I learned that her Ordnung was not a simple master.

  I had Anna, a trained nanny, looking after Renate when she was born. She was very efficient and the baby always looked starched and ironed. One day, after my afternoon visit with my child, I handed the baby back to Anna. When Renate felt those trained hands close on her, she began to scream. I didn’t know much about babies but I gave the nanny a week’s wages and asked her to pack her bags. I had the entire afternoon left to find a substitute. The town was brimming with unemployed servants. I sat in the nanny’s chair in the nursery and cuddled the baby, who lay in my arms unresponsively. Liesel had appeared briefly in the doorway as I was firing the nanny, and she gave a big gasp of irritation. Then I could hear her footsteps in the attic, where she was packing mothballs into the trunks of summer clothing. Her feet rapped angrily on the floorboards. A few minutes later she appeared again; she strode right up to me (I had not invited her in. The nerve!) and stuttered, “Frau Doktor Rother cannot just fire Anna for no reason. A baby will cry about being picked up, it has nothing to do with who is picking her up.” Such a long sentence cost her much effort.

  She was making my employment practices her business. Rage planted her right there, in her white and blue uniform, her hands on her hips in the manner of a sheriff, and repeated, “How can Frau Docktor Rother blame Anna for the baby crying? They always cry!” Well, she had a point. At once, I stood up and shoved Renate at Liesel’s apron. She had rolled her sweater sleeves up and was sweating slightly. I could see the muscles tense in her short white forearms as they moved forward reflexively to accept the burden. The baby lay in this unwilling, rebellious cradle and gazed in silence upward, toward Liesel’s limp eyes, the strands of black mule hairs on her forehead, the black eyebrows, and the gash of her cleft lip. I watched my infant, lying calmly, studying this new physiognomy. And then, for the first time in her life, Renate smiled.

  From then on, Liesel took sole care of our daughter. She also cooked and sewed for her, and of course when the child was sleeping, she helped the other servants with their chores, and also did some of the cooking. Our household soon depended entirely on her and I discouraged her from visiting her family. Liesel was blessed. She didn’t have a husband, she didn’t have children. Once, when she was about twenty-one, she had gotten it into her head to marry Josef, our chauffeur. I had seen that coming. I was prepared. I simply forbade it.

  I had seen Josef visit the kitchen once too often. I began referring to him as a hunchback. I rammed that nickname into circulation. Hunchbacked Josef. He didn’t really have a hunchback, but he would one day, you could tell, he was very tall and humble by nature, so he bent down when he spoke to people and one could see plainly that in another few decades, he would be permanently bent.

  “Liesel, it is out of the question. Not to such an ugly hunchback,” I said. “You are giving your life away. I cannot stand for that.”

  “He’s a good man,” she said. “He works hard.”

  “Work? He has fun. Every young man wants to drive a nice big car. And he is sensible, I have to hand him that. Because he wants a wife like you. But it’s out of the question. Renate can’t make do without you. She is only five!”

  She told Josef she didn’t want to get married, and that was that. He was so disappointed that he quit our services. Which was fine. Liesel stayed. Chauffeurs are easy to come by. I saw to it that we never hired any single men.

  I know horror stories about maids running off to marry. The Keils, for instance. They had a nanny named Fraulein Strecker for their child; she stayed on after he was grown up, and took care of the house along with the maid. Her butter cookies were pure poetry, and her sewing legendary. Fraulein Strecker lived in a third-floor room, with a pretty bed, and its own sink so she didn’t have to use the bathtub to wash. When she was sixty, Herr Keil was late for a luncheon at home with a colleague of his, a very rich but lonely banker, and Fraulein Strecker brought him something to drink and a newspaper to read. Somehow, this very fine gentleman fell in love with the old maid. He married her right under the nose of the Keils, and she spent the rest of her life as Frau Doktor Edelmann, in her own villa that was larger than the Keil villa, had a much larger garden, and more servants. She still used to bake cookies and send them over to the Keils, and when someone’s figure changed, she insisted they bring their wardrobe over and she would adjust it. But this was a shock to the entire community.

  Carl warned me that Liesel posed a different kind of danger. He felt that I was too dependent on her and she would take advantage of that. She would take charge.

  “You have to watch that Liesel,” Carl warned. “She is going to run the family someday. If you don’t watch out.”

  “Her behavior is impeccable,” I said. “She never stops working. And Renate is clean and well fed, and seems happy with her. But the child must never speak Silesian. It makes me feel ill.”

  The child grew and learned to speak Liesel’s Silesian fluently. In that ugly dialect, one “does” a lot—“I do take a walk, I do clean now”—and it just will not do. But Renate spoke perfect High Gearman with me, so I could not complain. She was a social chameleon. She could chat with our company at ho
me like a little lady. Then she went into the kitchen and wrapped herself around Liesel When she skinned her knee, she appealed to Liesel, even though I was the trained nurse. If she was sad, she crawled into Liesel’s lap. But she did not cry there. She did not cry anywhere. Even as a toddler, she rarely shed a tear, and she was fearless, which is a lack. Because she was also, clearly, lacking any fear of God. This was not apparent to others. In school, she blended in by keeping her personality under wraps. Her luminous dark eyes fooled even the drama teacher; each year in the Christmas pageant, she played her namesake, Maria.

  I bit my tongue, hoping she would grow into the role. After three years, I lost hope. “If they only knew what you are really like!” I told Renate.

  “Not even God knows!” she said.

  “You be quiet!” I snapped.

  During that pageant, she cast her eyes up to heaven with shattering intensity, her hands clasped to her chest. But as she looked down again, her gaze sought mine, and fleetingly, she winked. Laughter boiled up in me. My face refused to relax into an earnest expression; I buried it in my hands. I begged the Lord to make me sad or serious. He did not hear my prayers. I managed to have a huge laugh burst into my palms where it sounded like coughing. My eyes were red. Carl tapped me lovingly on the back.

  The teacher and the audience never suspected the real drama taking place. I reprimanded Renate, of course. “You put me on the spot!” I told her. “How can you be so ruthless!” She apologized, a rare occurrence. I suggested she see our confessor. But my daughter did not turn to others for help. She did not need it.

  She took after Carl in all matters requiring ability, even excelling in sports—she had inherited his broad shoulders and coordination and also his spirit of competitiveness. She loved a good match. And like Carl, she was not only musical but also clever. She skipped the first grade, and then the fourth, she was already in the upper grade of school, with two more to go before her Abitur when she was fourteen; it was 1935. The bill had come. I had to pay the price for my stubbornness and folly.