The Painted Kiss (11 page)

“Really, nothing happened,” I said.

“All right,” she said.

It was late. We knew that someone in our family must have noticed our absence by now.

“If we go in together we’ll each only get half,” I said. Though I wasn’t aware of being cold, my teeth chattered so that I could barely speak.

“No,” Helene said. I was shocked at how steely her voice was, and how much older she suddenly looked. “I’ll go to the front. You wait in the alley, and when you hear the shouting slip in the back way. We’ll just have to take the chance that no one has thought to check on you yet.”

I was grateful, though I was terrified for her, facing all of that fury by herself. I also felt very guilty. I had been as deceptive and illicit as she.

It went exactly as Helene predicted. I lurked at the corner of the building until I heard my father’s loud imprecations and my mother’s wails. No one saw me come in through the kitchen. No one heard me run up the stairs. No one thought to call me for supper, or put her hand to my forehead, or see if I was sleeping. No one noticed me at all.

“S
he’s not a Persian princess,” we heard Gustav say. “You can’t keep her up there forever.”

Helene and I were listening through the dining room door, which even at the time I knew was a farcical thing to do, but the outcome of this meeting was too important to sit in our room and speculate about what was said.

Helene had been locked in our room for two weeks now, allowed out only to bathe. Pauline and I brought her spartan meals and sometimes managed to sneak in an apple tart or
The Decameron
. She spent the time singing mournful songs and staring out of the window. Neither of our parents would speak to her. In fact, they seldom spoke to Pauline and me either, but sat at meals exchanging dark glances and slamming down the serving dishes and glassware. Pauline and I tried to become invisible. For a change I was grateful to have school to go to. And lessons with Gustav on Saturdays, of course.

The first lesson after the kiss I almost passed out in the carriage on the way to his house, but the house was the same, the kitchen was the same, Mrs. Klimt sat there with her knitting and a plate of freshly baked chocolate tea cakes. Gustav was exactly the same. It wasn’t that he was pretending that nothing happened; he seemed to have forgotten entirely. In a way I was relieved. Also disappointed.

Ernst had been trying to talk to our parents for weeks, but Mother wouldn’t answer the door. Ernst stood on the step in the snow, ringing the bell again and again. Finally, Pauline had to go out and tell him to go away.

Next he tried letters, but Mother burned them in the fireplace without reading them. She wept on the sofa throughout the day, pausing periodically to practice at the piano.

Finally Gustav had gone to the pipe factory. He had offered to act as a mediator, and Father, a reasonable man, accepted readily. I doubt he would have been so agreeable had he known what I had been up to the day Helene was caught.

“We can do what we choose,” Mother said. I couldn’t see her but I knew her chin was jutting out from her starched collar and that wisps of dark hair were falling into her eyes. Behind her back, she was picking the trimming off of one of her sleeves. I knew because she had taught me the same trick to keep me from biting my nails. A sleeve can take punishment better, can be easily repaired. I didn’t understand her attitude. Though when I was younger I hadn’t tested the strict confines of our upbringing, I had always assumed that it would be our mother who would sympathize, and our father who would rage. Perhaps she was jealous that one of her daughters had attempted to escape from the prison that held her.

“What will it accomplish?” Gustav said. He sounded impatient and disrespectful. “Helene lied, she’s been punished, it’s time to let it go.”

“I just can’t understand it,” said Papa. “Helene was always such a good child.”

Helene gave me a guilty, haggard look. She’d hardly slept in two weeks. If possible she looked more beautiful than ever with the blue shadows under her eyes and her pale, gaunt cheeks, the dark beauty opium addicts sometimes have. She had tied her hair into an absentminded plait and golden shoots sprung in every direction.

“She’s in love,” Gustav said. He sounded as if he were smiling. I felt Helene blushing.

“She’s only seventeen,” said Papa. “What does she know about it?”

“Ernst wants to marry Helene,” Gustav said. There was a silence broken only by a few sniffles from my mother. Apparently they had not been expecting it. Even though I had, it was not until that moment that I realized what it meant. She was leaving me, and I hated her for it, but mostly I hated Ernst. But then I thought, they will never allow it, and felt better.

“What does he have to offer her?” Mother said.

“She cannot marry until she is twenty,” Papa said. “And she must finish school.”

“All right,” said Gustav. “He’ll marry her when she’s twenty.” Helene leaned into me, trembling.

I waited for my father to shout, to say no, that Ernst wasn’t good enough for Helene, that it was ridiculous even to consider it, but he didn’t. There was a long silence.

“Is he a good artist?” Father asked. “Will he be able to provide for her?”

“He’s much better than I am,” Gustav said.

“Very well,” said Father. Mother said nothing. It wasn’t really her decision, it was Father’s, and he had decided.

It had been much too easy as far as I was concerned.

Then, the business concluded, the transaction complete, they ate Kirsch torte and drank coffee with
Schlagobers
and talked about the opera.

A week later my father said that instead of fetching me himself, Gustav would drop me off at home on the way to his studio. They had discussed it and it was more efficient that way. My father had decided that as my future brother-in-law Gustav was now a suitable chaperone.

“I had to do it,” Gustav said as I sat with him at Café Sperl. We had canceled our lesson in order to eat cake and discuss the unfolding family drama. “Ernst was making mistakes in the bookkeeping. It was getting expensive. And he burst into tears in front of Count Esterházy.”

He had bought me a piece of cake frosted with marzipan, my favorite. Under Gustav’s libertine tutelage I was quickly forgetting my manners. Gustav observed as I dismantled the cake, hacked off the pink and yellow rosettes of sugar and left them on the side of the plate, peeled away the icing to eat first, stabbed at the cake with my coffee spoon, pulled apart the crisp layers frosted with cocoa until finally I scraped the last few crumbs from the porcelain plate.

“You eat like a savage,” he said. “And your face is covered with cake.” He leaned across the table and wiped my mouth with a paint-spattered handkerchief dipped in ice water, as if I were a child in the care of a fastidious uncle. When he was finished, the corners of my mouth were red. My eyes strayed embarrassingly often to Gustav’s lips, so I looked at his cake. It was chocolate with layers of raspberry jam. As he picked it apart the jelly spread across the plate like blood.

“What did the count do?” I asked, returning to the matter at hand.

“Oh, he gave him a handkerchief and his flask of schnapps, calm as could be. Later, though, he asked me if Ernst might not be better off in a sanitarium. He could arrange it, if I thought…”

“Poor Ernst,” I said.

“Poor Ernst my…foot,” he said. “Thanks to me he has a beautiful fiancée and a salvaged career. He’s a lucky man.”

“Was that the only reason, to save your business?” I couldn’t help but ask.

“Well, no,” he said. “The loss of our most reliable models was becoming a problem.” I had been too afraid to come to the studio while the house was in such an uproar, especially alone.

“You mean your unpaid models,” I said.

“Well, yes,” he grinned. He seemed impervious to my serious mood. “Since you mention it, replacing you was becoming too expensive. Add that to all the bookkeeping mistakes and this affair cost the studio a month’s commissions.”

“What a romantic way to look at it,” I said.

“Some of us just aren’t romantic,” he shrugged. “You, for instance. I can’t imagine you crying into the curtains and singing lamentations.”

“No one has ever given me reason to,” I said.

“No one ever will. Those things only happen to people who seek them out,” he said. “Ernst and Helene were born to have a doomed love.”

I would remember our conversation years later, when Ernst was dead and my sister was drowning in the depths of grief. But at the time I thought rather bitterly that my sister had, once again, had everything turn out perfectly.

We were quiet for a while as we thought about our siblings. At least I thought about them. I don’t know where Gustav’s thoughts wandered but he came out in a place I wasn’t expecting.

“The sexual prudery of the middle classes,” he said. “I have no patience for it.”

“What?” I was shocked to hear the word said out loud, but to admit that would to have been guilty of the very thing he was talking about.

“Your parents,” he said. “So interesting. Enlightened and cultured in so many ways. ‘Support artists!’ they cry. ‘But not with our daughters!’ ”

“They were just thinking of her future,” I said, wondering why I was defending them.

“Why can’t the future be different?” he said. “Why can’t women and men be seen together without it ruining their reputations?”

“Why not?” I agreed. “Things can change.”

“Things will change only if people like us lead the way.” I wondered if he was asking me to do something. I had no desire to jeopardize my freedom anytime soon.

He painted a world without hypocrisy, where people were free to love whomever they chose regardless of age or social class or propriety, and even then I wondered if he really was interested in transforming society for everyone’s benefit, or if he just wanted to do as he pleased without being criticized for it. We both pretended that the discussion was academic.

W
eddings are not my favorite subject, never having had one myself. I’ve designed a lot of dresses for them, though. The weddings are remarkably similar to one another, whether the groom is a butcher or an aristocrat, whether the bride is pregnant already or still virginal. Somehow the sameness comforts people. The flowers will be white lilies; unless the bride’s father is ill her dress will be a snowball viburnum of white; the groom will be pale and nervous and drop the ring at the front of the church; the bride will cry and Handel will be played. In my long career I hoped that just once a bride would come to the salon and ask for a dress of grass green, but it never happened.

Two years passed before Helene and Ernst married. During that time Ernst was at our house constantly. Sometimes he brought Gustav and the four of us would sing or play card games. Though we were a foursome by convenience, there was not a hint of romance between Gustav and me. After awhile even I forgot that the kiss had happened, or rather, I remembered it as something silly I had done a long time ago. Other things came to occupy me: I made a new friend at school whose mother wore clothes made in Paris and who didn’t mind us pulling things out of her closet and examining them; I discovered Baudelaire and the French poets; and I fell in love.

I fell in love suddenly, as schoolgirls do, with a boy from the second floor of our building. Fritz’s father had a dry goods store. We met him with his family on the street and then I saw him everywhere: on the stairs, in the Volksgarten, in my favorite bakery. He began leaving presents for me in one of the great urns that flanked the entranceway of our building: letters, bunches of violets, marzipan. I knew from the beginning that he would be going into the army in a few months’ time and that only made the whole thing more romantic. When he left I cried incessantly and wrote copiously. We exchanged letters for several months and then the whole thing petered out. We had never kissed or even touched hands, but I felt that the relationship had changed me, that I was now a woman.

After the wedding ceremony we had a party for Helene and Ernst at our house. It was my designated task to shuttle from room to room, passing trays of ripe pear and pitted cherries. I didn’t really mind; it gave me something to do, and I could see and talk to everyone without getting stuck with one of the aunts, who wore old-fashioned bonnets and thought the ceremony was too long and that it was a shame Helene had become a Catholic. At least now, though, their sons could get government jobs.

Pauline and I wore robin’s egg blue organza dresses over constricting whalebone corsets that cost a fortune and made us hot and irritable, but there was no other way to even a twenty-two-inch waist for either of us. We were supposed to have seventeen-inch waists, but that wasn’t possible. Even corsets have their limits. The dresses had bell sleeves that cascaded from a tightly cut shoulder and I worried that they would fall into the trays of food I was carrying and be soiled. Pauline gave me a tight smile each time she passed and I knew she was thinking the same thing.

Gustav was taking Helene and Ernst’s photograph in front of the fireplace and people were gathered around to watch. It was a complicated enterprise involving a tripod, a black cape, and repeated explosions of flash powder. Gustav played up his role as if he were a magician. Helene was wearing my mother’s lace veil, made by nuns at a convent in the Italian Alps, and a China silk gown with an organza overskirt made by a dressmaker Gustav knew. She looked like the portrait of the empress by Winterhalter, in the best sense and also in the worst. The aunts could find nothing about her appearance to criticize, which meant that her attire was sumptuously conventional. When the photography show was over everyone filled plates with roast pork and onion pudding, dumplings filled with sausage and turnovers filled with pungent cheese. The dining room table sat twenty-four, and those that couldn’t find seats stood against the wall.

Pauline and I fled to the stairs, where we could unhook each other and eat in peace.

“Remember when we first moved here?” said Pauline, pressing her forehead against the polished wooden rails. “Your head fit between the bars and we played Marie Antoinette.”

“You’re going to get grooves on your temples,” I said. “People will wonder about you.”

“They already do,” she said.

“I remember the three of us descending the stairs to an imaginary receiving line wearing Mama’s paisley shawls,” I said through a mouthful of spaetzle. “How she must have laughed!”

“And now here we are, spinsters passing trays,” Pauline said.

“You’re only twenty-three,” I said, startled. “You’re not a spinster.”

“I only hope I don’t have to be a nursemaid, half-masticated turnips all over my front every day.”

“That will never happen,” I said. “You’re going to marry some distinguished lawyer. You’ll pretend not to see me when we pass on the street.” At least that made her smile.

“I don’t look like Helene,” she said.

“Think of all of the girls in your class,” I said. “Not one is as beautiful as Helene, and yet they still get married.” I thought she was being too hard on herself.

“Don’t use that condescending tone,” she said, “you’re not going to marry either.”

“What?” I felt as if I had been punched in the face.

“You’re going to be caring for Mama and Papa and taking in sewing.”

Suddenly I was shivering. “You’re crazy,” I said.

“Between the three of them they’ll never let you meet anyone,” she said. I knew who the third was without asking her but I pretended not to.

“Gustav likes having you around to flirt with. He’ll crush anything before it gets started.”

“What about Fritz?” I said defensively. Her laugh was ugly.

“That was like something out of a poem, and just as far removed from your real feelings. You’re in love with Gustav.”

“I’m not.”

“You and Helene thought you were so clever, did you think I didn’t know where you were going all of those months? It was my money that paid the train fare, remember?”

Of course she had known all along. Helene and I had gone on a great adventure and left her behind. We lumped her into the category of people not to be trusted. We had lied to her when we lied to our parents as if she were an old maiden aunt. We had not given her a chance to go along, to share the secret, to meet someone. And she had not said anything, had not betrayed us, and we had attributed it to our own skills at deception. No wonder she hated me.

“I’m sorry,” I said. The sausages on my plate were pooled in oil and no longer looked so appetizing.

“Gustav’s in love with himself. He likes to be admired. But he’s not interested in anything like this.” She gestured toward the garlands of narcissi draped over the banister.

“Who said I wanted to get married?”

“Don’t you?”

“The institution of marriage perpetuates the subordination of women.”

“Wake up, Emilie. Life perpetuates the subordination of women. That’s just the way it is.”

“It shouldn’t be.”

“What are you going to do if you don’t get married? How will you live?”

“Not nursing Mama and Papa and darning other people’s socks, I know that much.”

“Good for you. I just hope you have a plan.”

“What’s yours, if we’re on the subject?”

“Bookkeeper,” she said. “Maybe for a druggist. Or a tailor. Some little apartment, some geraniums in the window boxes, a cat. I know what I can expect and what is out of reach. I’ll be satisfied with that.”

I got up, leaving my half-filled plate behind. When I was halfway down the stairs I remembered I needed to be rehooked. It was humiliating to go back but there was no one else to do it.

She was leaning over the railing looking down into the hall. Her shoulders were hunched and her dull hair was coming out of its chignon. For a moment I had a flash of her as an old woman with arthritis, a Siamese, and a parlor ivy. It made me remorseful.

“We could paint your geranium boxes,” I said. “I could make stencils, of flowers and leaves, paint them pink and red, they’d look as if they’d come from a peasant village.”

“Forget everything I said,” she said. “This wedding has obviously sent me over the cliff. What do I know?”

Poor Pauline, she could see her own future, if not mine. But at least she kept the books at the salon instead of at some ugly, dreary man’s hat shop. At least she had a room at the salon instead of at some dirty, chill rooming house. At least she was never poor. Her cats were the offspring of Gustav’s tabby. She was famous for her orchids.

When I returned to my duties Gustav was settling his tottering father into a chair. Then he was turning pages for the pianist who was playing Haydn. He complimented the critical aunts and made them laugh and blush. He was everywhere, everywhere but where I was.

Suddenly, I felt ugly. My hair is too curly, I thought. Maybe I should try to flatten it with an iron. Despite my precautions, some freckles had appeared on my nose and were unwilling to leave, no matter how much lemon juice I used. My cheeks were round, and my figure was definitely not the type that Gustav preferred. I was going to be a fleshy woman, not a Rubens but definitely not a Klimt. I thought about Minna and Helga and their intertwined bodies. I was afraid of them. I was afraid to be like them.

I wanted to sit down and cry, and not the decorous kind of crying of a girl whose sister has just married or whose chevalier has taken the train to Graz. Instead I cleared plates until I heard the first notes of a Strauss waltz being played. Then I pushed through the crowd to watch Helene dance with Ernst. My sister was as pale and graceful as a porcelain figurine as Ernst whirled her around and around. He couldn’t dance well, the aunts noted disapprovingly. All he seemed to be able to do was turn. Who ever heard of a groom who couldn’t dance? Even ditch diggers had their own Lenten ball, where they danced like princes.

Helene’s skirt beat the time like the wings of a swan. People began to clap.

My eyes met Gustav’s and he gave me a little nod. He wanted to dance with me.

“Give me a kiss, little sister, we’re family now,” he said when we met, and brushed my hair with his lips. It was a brazen thing to do; everyone must have seen. Of course I couldn’t kiss him, on the head or anywhere else. I could feel every place where our bodies touched, though: hand to hand, forearm to forearm, shoulder to shoulder. His hand on my waist was warm and I melted into it like bronze into a mold. Occasionally the front of my dress brushed his jacket.

“I never knew before how much you liked to dance,” he said.

“Doesn’t everyone?” I said. I could kiss him now, here, in front of everyone.

“Not Ernst,” he laughed. “I tried to teach him at the studio last week. He can’t count in his head. It’s so humiliating for our family.”

“We should cut in on them soon,” I said, though it was the last thing I wanted. “I think Helene looks dizzy.”

“What? Are you tired of me already?” I could feel his breath on my cheek. I could see his carotid artery pulsing beneath the skin. He’d been smoking with my father earlier; his jacket smelled of cloves and nutmeg. His lips were so close to my cheek that my breath stopped for a moment.

He pulled back a fraction of an inch. “You’re right. It’s either a daring rescue or smelling salts and a mild scandal.” We broke apart and separated Helene and Ernst.

“I’m surprised she agreed to marry you,” I said to Ernst as he flung me around the room. He was slighter than Gustav and I could barely feel his hand on my waist. His palm in mine was hot. “Unless you didn’t tell her.”

“Oh, I warned her,” he gasped. “She said it didn’t matter.”

“She must love you very much then,” I said, “because you’re really awful.”

“I know,” he said. “I don’t deserve this. I was just lucky. But I will take good care of her, I promise.”

“You’d better,” I said. “I never want to hear her sing a Bach cantata ever again.”

“Now that we’re safely married, maybe we can find someone for you.” He was so proud of that “we,” had probably been thinking for weeks about saying it.

“That’s all right,” I said. “I can choose for myself.”

“No, no,” he was excited by this idea. “Let me look around the room.”

That was easy, since we made a three hundred and sixty degree turn every couple of seconds. I just hoped whomever he found wouldn’t insult my opinion of myself.

“What do you think of Josef Maier?” said Ernst. “He’s a decent portraitist.”

“He has someone with him,” I said, pointing to an auburn-haired girl in a cherry-colored dress.

“Well, there’s Georg,” he said. “But he’d smash all of the good china and anyway, he drinks too much.”

“Not Georg, definitely,” I agreed.

Then he stopped dancing abruptly.

“I know who,” he said. “Wait over there, I’ll be right back.”

I moved to the side and looked around. Helene was dancing with Papa. I didn’t see Gustav anywhere. I went into the kitchen, but everything had already been washed and put away. Pauline was turning pages for my mother, who had deposed the pianist. No one needed me for anything.

Ernst came toward me with a lanky boy, blond and pink with heat, like me. Franz, their partner in the studio. You would think that I would know him well, but he was always traveling. I had only seen him six or eight times in the past year.