CHAPTER 15
“What are you doing?” Frank asked when he opened his eyes.
Mamah lay just apart from the warm length of his body. She had tried not to wake him as she propped her head up with one hand and wrote in her diary with the other. “Did you know that you laugh in your sleep?” she asked.
His voice was groggy. “Consider it a bonus.”
Sometime during the night, they had untangled their limbs and finally gone to sleep. When she’d awakened and turned to Frank, she had found him as he lay now—in fact, as he had lain every night of the voyage—flat on his back without a pillow, his head tilted slightly back, his right hand resting on his chest as if he had pledged himself to slumber.
It seemed to her one of the most intimate of acts—to sleep with another person. Before they met in New York to embark on the trip, she and Frank had never slept together through the night. She had awakened before he did the first morning on the ship and could not take her eyes off him as his eyelids flickered and his chest moved up and down with each shallow breath. Pale light had chiseled his forehead, nose, and chin into such a still, foreign mask, she had felt a sense of panic. Do I truly know this man? It was when a smile flitted across Frank’s lips that his face had become familiar again. Just moments ago, he’d actually laughed.
How different we are, Mamah thought. This morning she had found her body at the edge of the bed, turned away from him and curled into a ball of blankets and pillows. She had slipped out of bed, put on a fresh gown, brushed her hair, and retrieved her diary before climbing under the covers again.
He was watching her now. “What are you doing?” he asked again.
She smiled. “Oh, I was just thinking about that wonderful puppet theater you designed last year.” The minute the words were out of her mouth, she regretted saying them. The little theater had been made for his youngest son. She put her hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right.”
“I’ve been trying to remember the words you wrote on it. Something about the moment right before you wake up.”
He lifted his head. “‘To fare on—fusing the self that wakes’…”
“…‘and the self that dreams.’ That’s it. I love that.” She penciled the words, then lay her head down again. The ship rose and fell on the swells, causing their bodies to roll gently back and forth. Under the blankets, with the pink sky glowing through the porthole, Mamah felt safe. She didn’t want to stand up, or dress, or hear bells or footfalls, or say good morning to the strollers on the deck.
The two of them had stayed huddled this way every morning of the voyage, unwilling to break the peaceful spell that sleep brought. Around nine o’clock, though, Frank’s stomach would grow queasy, and they would repair to the dining room to eat at an out-of-the-way table.
Frank had proceeded delicately with her from the moment they’d embraced in New York. At the beginning, none of it had seemed quite real to Mamah. Now, after six days together, the sense of unreality had settled into a solicitous, sometimes awkward dance between them. Before they departed, she had viewed their trip together as a sort of test. How else could two people truly know each other unless they lived together? But she was discovering that there were some things she didn’t want to reveal. She found herself sneaking a bit of color onto her cheeks and lips while he was out of the cabin.
Her beauty rituals were easy to conceal, compared to the mood shifts that washed over her out of the blue. The thought of John, so confused at her leaving, seized her with remorse time and again. It happened while she and Frank were waltzing to Schubert one evening; she felt the wind go out of her, and she put her face into his chest. When she confessed what she was feeling, Frank rose to the moment, comforting her with assuring words. But by the middle of the voyage, he was gently making his claim.
“Look,” he said one day, glancing up from his book, “Louise will care for the children. And Edwin knows the truth.”
“I know, I know. It’s just that sometimes I think we should have—”
“Never mind the shoulds.” He put his hand on hers. “Don’t squander this time, Mame. How long have we talked about having time alone? Five years? Relax. Please. Be with me.”
When they went back to their cabin, she kept her eyes closed during their lovemaking. In those moments, forgetfulness freed her mind, and she felt his joy in truly having her to himself.
Later, they dressed warmly and draped blankets over their shoulders and heads to walk around the deck. Their breath puffed white in front of them while black clouds belched out of the three tall smokestacks overhead. The ship’s engine roared, and waves crashing against the bow made conversation difficult.
“I’m not even cold,” he shouted.
“What is it?”
“Not cold. Are you?”
“No,” she lied.
He saw her rattling inside the blankets. “Open your pores, Mamah!” He laughed.
“I take my freedom warm,” she shouted, grabbing his hand and pulling him back inside.
At dinner hour, when they had to talk to other people at their table, she was relieved to have an elegant Frenchman on her left. Frank had the misfortune of being between Mamah and a garrulous woman from Kansas City.
“So you’ve left the brood at home,” she heard the woman say. “George and I took a tour when our girls were nine and ten.”
“You don’t say,” Frank muttered, slicing his steak.
“Oh, it was the best thing we could have done. Isn’t that right, George?” The woman slapped her husband’s knee. “How many children do you lovebirds have?”
“Nine,” Frank replied.
“Nine!” The woman reared back in her seat. “My goodness. Your wife certainly has kept her figure.”
Mamah turned, red-faced, toward Monsieur—Bonnier, was it?—who was critiquing American movies.
“Madame Wright,” he was saying, “why do your newspapers scold about smoking and negligees in your films?” He addressed the whole table then. “For a country that claims to be open and free, you Americans are such Puritans.”
“You make a point,” Frank said, lifting his glass. “A toast to each of our countries’ better parts. To cowboy movies,” he said, looking around at his companions, “and French lingerie.”
Everyone leaned back and laughed.
“Oh, you’re a naughty man,” said the woman from Kansas City, giggling. “I can tell a naughty one when I see one.” She slapped her husband’s knee again. “Isn’t that right, George?”
When the orchestra played later in the evening, Frank swept Mamah around the floor in a joyful, careless waltz.
Let go of what people think, he had said to her when they’d first set out from New York. Now, near the end of the crossing, she felt she was beginning to.
That night Mamah dreamed she was flying. She saw herself moving like a bird, arms outstretched, across the sky. A small hinged door in her chest opened up, and dark colored shapes fell through the opening to the snow-covered fields below.
CHAPTER 16
Mamah and Frank were exhausted by their train ride from Paris. They slowly pushed their way out of the station into Berlin’s pallid light. “Eine Gepackdroscke bitte,” Mamah said to the porter, who secured a luggage taxi and squeezed their six bags into it, plus the large portfolio Frank had kept at his side throughout most of the trip. Now, as the car moved along Unter den Linden and passed through the Brandenburg Gate, the driver pointed out their hotel in the distance, standing like a fortress guarding the grand boulevard.
Frank had been vague about their accommodations until the moment they climbed into the taxi. It was then that he announced, “The Hotel Adlon.” Mysterious, Frank was. How he loved to gift-wrap a moment. “It’s new” was all he would say. She liked it that way—the not knowing, the little surprises.
The Adlon, all 250 rooms of it, was as regal as a Bavarian palace. When they stepped out of the car, they were swept along by porters in gold epa
ulets who spoke English for their benefit. She felt rumpled after a day of train travel, but Frank escorted her into the lobby as if they were visiting royalty.
Mamah had never witnessed such opulence. While Frank registered, her eyes followed red carpeting up the central marble staircase to the gallery above, where plaster goddesses mounted on medallions smiled down on them. No bells sounded, but a system of lights twinkled at the porters’ station. Pages swished quietly past the skirts and luggage of new arrivals. Clutches of men and women sat smoking on green mohair banquettes, chatting in Italian, French, and Russian.
Mamah’s eye was caught by an exotic figure sitting across from where she stood. The woman was young and beautiful, with wavy black hair and olive skin. She wore a gown draped with filmy red and yellow scarves, and she was speaking soothing Spanish to a parrot on her shoulder. No one stared at the woman the way people would back home, where she’d have been as freakish as the dog-faced girl at the dime museum on State Street. Here she was just a small figure in a big tapestry.
“The whole place was designed by Herr Adlon,” the young porter said as he escorted them to the elevator. “Everything, even the face towels. Even this,” he said, touching the soutache swirls on his cuff. “He cares about all the little details.”
“A man of character,” Frank said.
On the third floor, the porter opened the door to their suite. Mamah walked in first and drew a quick breath at the gilded furniture and floor-to-ceiling Palladian windows.
Frank followed her in and looked around. “Headquarters!” He grinned, his eyes glinting with merriment.
The porter led them through the rooms, demonstrating water faucets and curtain pulls. The bed was massive, with a carved headboard and footboard. At the end of it, the boy set up a suitcase stand.
“Will you open the windows?” Frank asked. The young man obliged. Cold air and traffic sounds drifted into the bedroom.
Frank palmed the porter a tip. Once he was out the door, Frank bent over and held his sides, his eyes tearing up from laughter. “Good Lord, the gold leaf alone.”
“It’s a little bit much,” Mamah said, “but I like it.” She went to wash up, and when she returned to the sitting room, she found Frank rearranging the furniture. He had already moved several chairs and a small ormolu table over to the window.
“What are you doing?”
“Making this place habitable.”
She watched, amused, as he climbed up on the back of a sofa and took down a large portrait of a full-skirted lady in a white wig.
“Adieu, Marie Antoinette. Off with your head.” He lugged the painting out into the hallway, where he leaned it against the wall. Two more pictures in carved gold frames followed the first. Frank folded his arms, studying the curtains.
“You wouldn’t,” she whispered as he walked over and fingered the heavy velvet.
“Oh, I would if I could. It’s so damn dark in here. But they’re attached too high to take them down.”
He climbed up on a brocade fauteuil. Heaving an armful of fabric, he tied each panel so the curtains ended in knots five feet off the floor. “Would you hand me my walking stick, my dear?”
Mamah retrieved it from a corner and passed it up to him. She was laughing now, too.
Frank took the stick, placed it beneath one knot, and lobbed the balled material up onto the boxy top of the valance above the window.
“Bravo!” she shouted.
Frank repeated the stick trick with the other curtain. Still standing on the chair, backlit by sunlight, he eyed the crystal chandelier that hung over the center of the sitting room.
“Don’t do it!” She laughed. “You’ll kill yourself. Then you’ll have a spiritual adventure, all right.”
Frank climbed down from the chair. “I’m not finished yet,” he said. He pulled the heavy sofa away from the wall and moved it over so that it faced the window. They collapsed onto it together and watched the city light up as evening fell.
“Welcome home, Mamah.” He put an arm around her. “Such as it is.”
IN THE MORNING she lay quietly beside his sleeping body. She loved the soap smell of him; the full lower lip perfectly still; the immaculate fingernails trimmed to crescents. She felt safe with him here, as she had on the boat.
They walked the streets together that first full day in Berlin. They had no map, no agenda. Frank said he preferred to simply bump into things. Yet when they found themselves in front of an art gallery on the Kurfürstendamm, Mamah suspected he had conspired from the start to lead her there. Inside, they found wonderful woodblock prints for sale.
Frank was taken with a picture showing a man on horseback riding through a dense stand of trees. “Waldritt,” he murmured, reading the penciled title. “What does that mean?”
“Forest ride,” she said. The horseman was lit with a beam of ocher-inked sunlight as he came into a clearing. “This figure is probably a knight seeking the Holy Grail,” she said after she’d translated the few lines of text next to the print.
“Well, then, I guess that settles it,” Frank said. He wore a sheepish grin as he paid for it.
THE NEXT DAY, he left early for his first meeting with Wasmuth.
“It’ll be a full day today,” he called to her as he headed out the door. “Go have some fun for yourself.”
Mamah suppressed the impulse to get out on the street. She spent time unpacking instead, placing the few garments she’d brought in perfect little piles. She wanted to start things right.
She pulled a plain wool dress from the wardrobe and put on a pair of sensible walking shoes. At noon she went down in the elevator and was seated in the dining room.
“May I recommend the bouillabaisse?” the waiter asked when he came to her table. “You won’t find it anywhere else in Berlin.”
Mamah hesitated. “Bouillabaisse?”
“A seafood soup our chef invented for the kaiser.” The waiter bent down as if to show her something on the menu. “Look over there, madam,” he said softly. “Kaiser Wilhelm himself.”
A group of military officers talked intently around a table across the room. The most decorated of them was clearly the kaiser, holding forth while the others nodded.
“They say he changes uniforms five or six times a day,” the waiter whispered.
While Mamah waited for her soup to arrive, she studied the other diners. Several women—wives of diplomats and businessmen, no doubt—ate alone at the white linen–covered tables scattered along a wall of high windows like those in her suite. The sound of silver clinking on china echoed in the cavernous space. Beneath the Rafael-like ceiling mural, women balanced hats like great fruit baskets on their heads. They brought to mind porcelain figurines, with their cinched waists, their breasts thrust forward by S-shaped corsets, as they raised teacups to their lips.
When her food arrived, the saffron broth of the bouillabaisse tasted delicious. She devoured the mussels and lobster as fast as propriety allowed, smiling between bites at the wonderful strangeness of it all. Dining alone in Berlin, dressed like a Quaker. In the midst of a passionate love affair. Sitting right across from Kaiser Wilhelm himself.
Mamah wished at that moment that Mattie or Lizzie were there. She would take either one of them right now, just to laugh. To throw back their heads and howl at the absurdity of the situation. She hoped someday they would forgive her enough that they could do that—laugh together again, about anything.
CHAPTER 17
November 2, 1909
Frank is tense these mornings. He has much invested in making this trip profitable. He wants to be relaxed, but he can’t be. He is most happy doing his work, not negotiating. Besides the big monograph of perspective drawings of all the buildings he has designed, Wasmuth will be printing a photo book of Frank’s completed work. This Sonderheft is small in scale but many pages long, 110 or more. So Frank is doing two projects, and worried as he tries to get the money together still.
Yesterday I went with him to Wasmuth
’s office. Huge, and a little awe-inspiring. I had no idea the man had 150 people working for him. Frank feels important when he goes to that office, but I didn’t enjoy it. Too much pretense.
The hour just after Frank left each day was the difficult time. Dressing to go out that first week in Berlin, voices—Mattie’s, Edwin’s—filled her mind, arguing with her as she pulled on her stockings. She would rush outside onto the streets, where the words in her head dissolved into German conversations all around her.
Mamah fell in step with other people bustling through the Tiergarten. Once before, she had visited Berlin, on her honeymoon with Edwin. When she arrived this time, she had braced herself for something, some pang. But Berlin was devoid of Edwin’s ghost. She could recall little of their honeymoon except that they had ventured out from their hotel in a small radius, always returning for a nap after a couple of hours of museums and dining.
Now, with her little red Baedeker guide in hand, she set out each day to explore a new piece of Berlin. It was a big sprawling city that reminded her of Chicago, for it was teeming with Poles, Hungarians, Russians, Scandinavians, Austrians, Italians, French, and Japanese. She used the Stadtbahn when she had to, but preferred walking, poking through shops and art galleries between the official destinations—the royal palace, the Arsenal, the Reichstag.
She quickly tired of warriors on muscled bronze horses. Mamah didn’t know what she was after, but she was hungry for something authentic. Wading into crowds as they shopped, she eavesdropped on the conversations and little dramas of the Berliners around her. She was astonished by the potpourri of languages at every turn. She heard an Italian tossing off English slang to a German butcher, and a Russian in high dudgeon hurling French curses at a German taxi driver.