Bliss, Remembered (25 page)

“Oh, I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, Dad was the only one of the brothers who survived, and he was wounded.”

“Is he okay?”

“Oh yeah, he recovered. Almost entirely. He still has a slight limp, but most people can’t even notice. He was lucky. His ship sank, but he got to shore safely.” Then he pointed out more recent pictures of his parents. “That was in Portugal.”

“When he was the ambassador?”

“Yes.”

His father, Klaus, was as handsome as Horst was, with the same light coloring, the same smooth features that would be too pretty on most men, except for the sharp chin and eyes that had a hint of the devil in them. Herr Gerhardt was standing, smiling, with one arm around his wife. She was a beautiful little blonde. Inge. It looked like you could put Inge in pigtails and she would yodel. There was also a photograph of the sister, Liesl, at her wedding, and she was every bit as adorable. Her husband was in his army officer’s uniform.

On the same table was another photo, this one of several men, standing together in some sort of garden. It took me a moment before I realized that it was Hitler himself in the middle; Herr Gerhardt was at the end. “Your father knows Hitler?”

“Well, he’s met him a few times. That’s in Bergdorf, the mountains. He’d get mad at me for telling you this, but Dad thought he had a chance to be the next ambassador to London, but it seems it’ll be von Ribbentrop.” That meant nothing to me, but Horst pointed to another man, the one standing to Hitler’s right. “There. Hitler’s crazy about von Ribbentrop, but Dad doesn’t think he’s all that bright.” He waggled a finger at me. “Now, Fraulein, don’t you dare repeat a word of that.” Of course, he was smiling when he said that.

“Are you kidding?” I said. “I can’t wait to spill the beans about that down on the Eastern Shore.”

“I hate a girl who can’t keep a secret.” He put the picture back in its place. “Anyway, Dad figures now that he’ll probably get sent back to Tokyo, as the ambassador there this time. Mom’s not crazy about the idea, but she likes being an ambassador’s wife. And it’s different now. The Japanese are pretty much our friends.”

“Would you go, too?”

“Back to Japan? Oh no. Just the one more year at Heidelberg, and when I graduate, do my damn time in the Navy—”

“Why the Navy?”

“Oh, the Gerhardts’ve always been a naval family. Besides: better than the army. I don’t want anything to do with guns, thank you very much. So get the sailor stuff outta the way and then go to architecture school.” He picked up his drink and raised it to me. “Of course, now, I will go back to Tokyo in ’40, so I can be there with you when you win the gold medal.”

I said, “Then I’ll never let you leave me again,” and with that as a pretty good jumping-off point, Teddy, we began to kiss—

Yes, Teddy, but not for long. Pretty soon we were on the sofa, and we were doing some heavy necking. We called it “necking” then. I don’t know when “making out” came into the vernacular. And the necking was getting pretty hot, and suddenly Horst stopped, and he said, “I’m sorry, Sydney, I promised you that you could trust me.”

And let’s just say I did something then that upped the ante, and I said, “Well, I didn’t promise you that you could trust me.”

And he got this wonderful expression on his face—surprise and delight. It may be the most gratifying expression you ever see from another human being, Teddy: surprise and delight, together. And so I drew even closer to him, if that was possible, and I whispered: “I want to make love to you, Horst.” I knew exactly what I wanted, Teddy. I knew exactly what I was up to.

And he said, “Somehow, I didn’t think you ever had.”

And I said, “No.” Just that. But then I said, “Only not here. In your bed, Horst. Because when I’m gone, I want you to think of me every time you go to sleep.”

Well, I’ve gotta be honest with you, Teddy. That poetry wasn’t exactly spontaneous. I’d thought of that when he was out of the room, getting the drinks. I told you I knew what I was up to. I didn’t want to be a so-called nice girl anymore. I decided that I’d rather have it be nice instead. So I got up and put out my hand, and he took it, and we went upstairs to his room. I wasn’t the least bit nervous. I mean, here I was about to go to bed with a guy who’d screwed Leni Riefenstahl, the big movie star. But you know what? I figured he knew a lot of men had screwed Leni Riefenstahl, but I’d be very special.

So we made love in his bed. It was wonderful. You always hear how the first time isn’t so good. Well, I can’t speak for any other girl, but it sure was wonderful for this girl. So, in a while, of course, we made love again.

Don’t you hate it, Teddy, the way everybody nowadays just says “have sex” instead of “made love”? What a terrible devaluation of the language on the one hand and love on the other. I didn’t think at all: I’m having sex. I thought: Wow, I’m making love.

And we were lying there, then, and Horst said, “I better get you back to the dorm.”

“Why?”

“Isn’t there a curfew?”

“Not really,” I said. “They just sort of expect you back. But what’re they gonna do with me? Not let me swim in the Olympics? I’m not allowed to anyway.”

And so I went to sleep in his arms, in his bed. And I remember so well, Teddy, when I woke up the next morning, looking over at him, my own liebchen, lying there, his hair splayed out over the pillow. He was so handsome. And I thought to myself, Lord, but you sure are different now, Trixie Stringfellow. Only I didn’t mean that I was different because I was a woman now, because I’d had a man. No, I thought how different I was because I’d learned how to love, and I knew that someone magnificent loved me too, with all his heart and soul.

I turned off the tape recorder and said no more, departing, leaving Mother alone in the garden with her reveries—thinking back to the time of her life. That, I realized was what Berlin had been. People always say: I had the time of my life. But I guess some people only have that one time that qualifies. And Mom did. And now that she was back there, I left her alone.

I was somewhat relieved, too, that she had come to what I concluded must be the romantic denouement of this saga. Of course, I remembered that the mysterious contents of that purple acetate folder were yet to be revealed. But what could be left? After all, young Sydney Stringfellow would have to be returning home from Germany in another week or so, and what further role could the incandescent Horst Gerhardt possibly play in her life? He had wooed my mother, given her the time of her life, fallen just as hard and fairly for her as she had for him, and acted with perfect honor even as he deflowered her and, to boot, escorted her to ecstasy.

Good grief, no wonder an old woman who was dying remembered this glorious idyll of her youth so vividly and so tenderly. Indeed, now I was able to restrain my earlier anger toward Horst. I knew that my mother had dearly adored my father and been devoted and true to him in her love for a half-century, till death did they part. It would be nothing short of spiteful of me to resent this one gloriously romantic interlude that my mother shared with another man in another time and place before my father materialized in her life.

Besides, by comparison, it made me recall my own ragged and unsatisfying admission into the realm of sexual congress, and I could only be envious that my dear mother had chosen so well for her debut and orchestrated the performance so neatly, down even to her dialogue that would have done justice to the most lush French novel. Only, how had she forgotten to hire the violins to play “Love in Bloom” and the cherubs to toss rose petals upon the bed?

Then, too, how could you—how could any man or woman—not be taken with young Herr Gerhardt? As my mother had wanted to be his lover, I wanted to be his buddy, his chum, his pal. The guy was quite special, that’s for sure, a grand co-star in the epic my mother had starred in.

So I waited upstairs and returned to the garden only when Mom called for me to bring her a couple more ice cubes. When I reached her, she began by offering some apology.

“Sorry if I told you more than you wanted to know, Teddy. I suppose I was almost in something of a trance there for awhile.”

“Oh, that’s okay, Mom. It’s about love, and there’s always room for more of that in this tawdry twenty-first-century world of ours.”

“Well, thank you for indulging me, but I suppose if I’m going to tell my story, I might as well not censor any of it—especially the sweet spots. I warned you there’d be a little sex.”

“Mom, you were fine. You were very decorous. I give it a PG-13.”

She accepted that assessment, but then couldn’t resist: “I spared you the full-frontal nudity.”

So, okay, if she was going to be flip now, I’d pay her back in kind. “Of course, if you’d told me that you’d first given it away to Frankie of Easton, Maryland, parked by a corn field in the back seat of some jalopy, I wouldn’t’ve been as approving.”

“That’s no way to talk to your old mother.”

“All right, I’ll give you the megaphone back.” I flipped on the tape recorder. “Where do we go from here?” She only grinned at that, and answered by simply reaching back into the purple acetate folder to pull out the swatch of magenta, which she placed on her lap, where she could pat it occasionally for either emphasis or affection. And so she began again.

You’ve heard that phrase about the Nazis: “the banality of evil?”

Well, Teddy, the Goebbels party would be the beauty of evil. Of course, I saw only the former. That evening I was myself a microcosm of almost every German. They said that for as long as Hitler had the economy humming and was winning battles, most people in Germany simply ignored the other terrible, obvious realities. And like that, this evening, I was so blinded by how perfectly gorgeous it all was, that I never stopped to ponder what horror paid for this sumptuousness. Not for a moment did it cross my mind.

I said: I was Germany in microcosm. I knew enough by then, Teddy. I wasn’t completely blind. Horst had told me things. No, I’m not flagellating myself. I’m simply saying that, looking back, I see how easy it is for any of us anywhere to go along. That’s all. And Horst was Exhibit B. He, who had told me how he wanted to shout from the rooftops about injustice, ah, when the chance came to enjoy the fruits of that terror so that he could impress a pretty girl, he bought her a gown and pleaded with his father to get him inside the tent, and then he forgot all the complaints he’d had and drank the hemlock just like everybody else.

It worked, too. The pretty girl wasn’t just in love anymore. She was in his thrall.

We pick and choose so, don’t we, Teddy? We are the most selective of creatures.

And so we arrived at the Goebbels, amid spotlights crossing the heavens like a Hollywood premiere—Horst in his white dinner jacket, me in my scrumptious magenta gown.

We were obscenely handsome, all the more so that we were, I’m sure, the youngest couple there. I realized—smugly—that everyone was looking at us with envy. Why, Teddy, they were all Ponce de Leon, lookin’ to drink from our fountain.

The Goebbels’ estate was on an island in the Havel River, on the way down to Potsdam, not far from where Horst and I had gone swimming in Lake Wannsee. I forget the German name of the island, but it means “peacock,” and, yes, the birds roamed the gardens. Kings had lived there. But Goebbels had dressed it up beyond what mere royalty would have been satisfied with. In a way, Teddy, this was his coming-out party for international society, and all of us embroidered his respectability.