Under the Same Blue Sky (18 page)

“Rembrandt.” Not a difficult question, but hard to answer with my throat so dry.

“Precisely. The original Rembrandt is owned by an Italian banker near Trieste. You know the current conditions there?” I nodded. Pinpricks for the endlessly vacillating battle lines in northeastern Italy made lace of my father’s maps. “The banker wants to move to Switzerland. He’s selling this Rembrandt and other objects of his collection and believes that American collectors will offer advantageous prices.”

“But how will he get them out,” I blurted, “with U-boats in the Bay of Trieste? It would take a miracle.”

The marble face warmed, and I glimpsed, as through a veil, a man who might once have laughed. “In a sense, yes, a miracle. However, Miss Renner, war never occupies
every
man, even in a battle zone. The task is finding agents willing to take risks, for a price, of course. How else can art survive?
Your
job is to write an offering letter describing the portrait to a collector in New York.” He indicated a second sheet. “Here is additional material regarding its condition, place in the artist’s
opus
, and provenance. You’ll find paper and pen in the desk and a sample offering letter in the Dürer folio. Draft your version and tell me when it’s done.”

A Swiss clock with fantastically looped numerals chimed half past ten. I read Friedrich’s work, quickly wrote a similar letter in my best script, and brought it to the baron, who scanned the page and returned it to me. “Miss Renner, please understand that what you call a miracle must be funded, which requires a motivated buyer. And don’t ramble on; he’s a busy man.”

I took back my page and studied it. Yes, I could describe the portrait better and intimate the difficulties of acquiring it. I did this and brought my revision to the baron. Surely he’d be pleased. When he turned away to read, I saw only the ordered waves of chestnut hair, starched collar,
and the edge of my page. He returned it without a word, as if spurning infection.

I went back to my desk, sweating in the cool room. The slight scratch of his pen filled silences between the clock’s solemn ticks. Possible wordings collided and smashed into jumbled phrases. My own pen slipped and clattered on the desk. Each start proved no better than the last. The wastebasket filled with crumpled pages. Desperate, I studied the reproduction. Why would anyone open a wallet for this dough-faced old woman in a starched, ridiculous headdress? “Start by observing,” I used to tell the children. “See the lacy veins in a maple leaf.” I saw how light played on the woman’s net of wrinkles. Slowly, her beauty unfolded. How delicately Rembrandt had suggested a lonely, restless soul. In the wistful eye I saw her considering her own mortality, inviting us to consider our own. Word by word, I rebuilt the letter. This portrait
must
endure. I ached for the dangers it faced from Trieste to America. My back, arm, and right hand cramped; sweat smeared the desktop.

When I set a clean copy before the baron, he didn’t look up. “Is this your best, Miss Renner?”

A soldier climbs out of his trench, fully exposed. “Yes. It is my best.”

“Then I’ll read it carefully.” Minutes passed as I stared, immobile, out diamond-paned windows. He put down my page and turned to me. “You can use a typewriter?”

“I never have.”

“I’m sure you’re quite capable. You seem tired. Offering letters can be difficult.” I dared look at his face, more open now and less fearfully beautiful. “Anna will have lunch prepared. I’m sure you’d like to inform your parents of your new employment.”

“I’m hired?” He might have been speaking another language which I only now understood.

“Yes. You will be engaged in ‘the business of peace.’ Welcome to
Mein Königsberg, Miss Renner.” He held out a manicured hand, surprisingly warm. “It will be convenient for me if you live here since your hours will be long and sometimes unpredictable. That would be acceptable?”

To live in a castle? “Yes.”

“Would twenty-five dollars per week, with lodging and meals, be sufficient?”

“That’s very generous, sir.”

“Not particularly. You’ll earn your salary. We begin at eight precisely tomorrow morning. I’ll have a room prepared. That’s all for today.” As I left, the handsome face turned toward Friedrich’s chair.

On my way to the kitchen, every bolt of sunlight, every shadow and sheen was delightful. I was here “for the duration,” as people said of the war, here among the masterworks, here where I’d begun. My parents should be pleased or at least intrigued that I was working with an actual baron and vaguely “in the professions.” Perhaps they could visit. Nobody would ask if I was a witch.

By the time I’d reached the kitchen, somehow Anna knew I’d be staying. Setting out sliced pork, potatoes, green beans, pickles, and fresh bread, she said Tom was on his way to collect my bags from the boardinghouse. Tilda, the housekeeper I’d rarely see, would prepare my room. How quickly news flew through these hallways. “I’m so glad to have you back,” said Anna, stroking my hair with the authority of one who’d washed my first curls. In that intimacy, I asked what Tom wouldn’t tell me and I couldn’t ask the baron.

“Why did he leave Prussia? The Hendersons said there was family trouble.”

Anna closed the kitchen door and glanced out the window. Then she pulled a chair close to mine and spoke softly in German, her hand on my arm. “They gave him a pot of gold and suggested he go to America.
They wanted to give their castle in Prussia, the
first
Mein Königsberg, to his younger brother, who would preserve the family line.”

“I don’t understand.”

The voice dropped. “Our baron wouldn’t marry the princess they courted for him, or any other princess, baroness, or merchant’s daughter.”

“Why not?”

Her glance said this was a childish question, too innocent to answer. “Because he wouldn’t. That’s all I can say.”

“How do you know all this?”

“We sailed on the same ship from Hamburg. He was in first class and I was in third, but I met a woman who knew his family. She didn’t like them, but our Baron Georg was a gentleman, she said, worth the lot. I got work in Newark, but when I heard he was building this castle, I came to Dogwood, cooked him a good meal, and stayed ever since.”

“Friedrich?”

“Was his assistant,” she said shortly. Here the tale ended. With a great bustle she began chopping cabbage, saying loudly, “Everybody loves my sauerkraut.”

I saw the baron’s chill and astonishing beauty differently now: softened by the sadness of exile. The kitchen filled with the sweet, remembered tang of cabbage. I began a letter home, describing Dogwood and the castle, why I’d chosen to stay, and my new job. “Many here remember Margit,” I added, not specifying what was remembered. I wrote of Emil and the scarlet jackets that were no dream. “Please visit me soon” I finished.

I pictured my father reading the letter and discussing it with my mother in the quiet kitchen as she rolled out spaetzle for Sunday dinner. Would they be happy for me? Would they visit? Since coming to Pittsburgh, they’d never been more than fifty miles from its center. This much I knew, that after reading the letter, my father would reach
for the
Volksblatt
. The pages would crinkle as he read war news aloud. My mother might cajole him to speak awhile of store business, their friends, the price of meat, or a new Charlie Chaplin film they might see. But soon enough, he’d reach for his tin tools. My mother would take up her mending, stealing anxious glances at the beloved face. Could I help her if I still lived there? No, I might distract him, but only peace in Europe would bring back the cheerful man I once knew.

“If you leave now, you’ll catch the afternoon post,” Anna was saying. Yes, I’d do that. Outside, the taciturn gardener I’d met at the gate was pruning a rosebush.

“So you’ll be staying, miss?”

“Yes. I’ll be working with the baron.”

“Working with the baron,” he repeated, circling the bush.

“Yes. Do you know when Tom will be back?”

He shook his head, cradling a bent branch. “Kurt’s doesn’t talk much,” Tom would say later. “But he’d go through fire for the baron—or his roses.” When I took my leave of Kurt, he nodded, still studying the bush.

I’d been in Dogwood barely a day, but from the quick glances and frank stares in town, it was clear that somehow everyone knew that I’d be staying. Tom’s getting my bags from Twin Oaks had been proof enough. I caught wisps of phrases behind my back: “Margit’s girl . . . Pittsburgh . . . German . . . the castle.” On Main Street a woman leaving McClellan’s Bake Shop was the first to address me. “You’ll be working with the baron, Miss Renner?”

“Yes.”

“Well then, welcome to Dogwood.” She volunteered no more and hurried away.

“Still doesn’t make him a regular guy,” whispered two men at the post office. They hushed when I passed. Outside Henderson’s,
teenage boys sitting on a Ford muttered, “Krauts taking over the town.” A gleaming wad of tobacco-streaked spittle landed on the sidewalk. I ducked inside.

“Lazy louts, a disgrace to Dogwood,” said Mrs. Henderson, beating on the window until the boys slid languidly off the Ford, only to lean against it. “Don’t worry. They’re all bark. But now that you’re here, could you bring these headache powders to the baron?”

“Yes, of course.” I dawdled in the shop, waiting for the louts to amble away. Then I hurried back to the castle. If only it had a moat and walls high enough to keep the war away.

“Tom brought your bags,” Anna said. “Come see your room.” It was on the third floor, facing north, with a window overlooking a wide lawn, orchard, and rolling fields beyond Dogwood. A poster bed with a thick comforter filled a corner. The long table would be perfect for drawing. And for reading, I surmised by a stack of books on art history clearly placed for study. A small etching hung on the wall: a Rembrandt. I had a Rembrandt in my room.

“It’s perfect,” I told Anna.

F
OR THE NEXT
week I rarely left the castle grounds, organizing papers to the baron’s meticulous orders and studying Friedrich’s letters to tease out his methods. Workdays ended with tedious practice at a Remington typewriter, hunting letters and finding a rhythm that would keep the evil keys from jamming. “How did Friedrich learn all this?” I asked Tom on one of the evening walks that soon became our practice.

“Not in the first month.” Every day revealed the baron’s astounding competence: recognizing forgeries, evaluating collections, determining fair or possible prices, packing and shipping methods, and weighing safe routes that shifted with blinding speed. My own daily work was mundane: filing, copying, culling prices from ledgers, and preparing
invoices. But the baron insisted on a broader education in art. “Study this tonight,” he might say of a treatise on Greek and Roman hairstyles useful in dating classical sculpture. Yet this work suited me, and it wouldn’t risk betraying gentle souls like Ben’s or raising expectations I couldn’t fulfill. I was content in the castle, feeling the warmth of Emil’s woodwork, and imagining that certain plays of color, the set of vases on long tables, or the curve of garden paths showed Margit’s hand. In late April, I wrote to the Burnetts, hoping Alice was well and briefly relating my work with an art dealer in New Jersey. I didn’t ask if Ben’s body had been found, or say that still, before sleep, I imagined us on my porch, easy with long silences before he slid into the woods.

In May the baron went to New York for business. While I had a hefty list of tasks, the longer afternoons left time for sketching: Anna working by a sunny window, Kurt in the kitchen garden, or Tom building a gazebo to be covered with climbing roses.

“I’m using Friedrich’s plans. He loved roses,” Tom said as I worked. “He and Kurt spent hours talking about them. Friedrich would have built this himself if he hadn’t gone to be a pilot.”

“And the baron—”

“Tried everything to make him stay.” Tom consulted a careful sketch. “But in the end, all he could do was have his cousin Manfred get Friedrich in a good flight school. Germany has great pilots and the best planes.” Tom looked up through the half-made gazebo into a blue bowl of sky. “They’re the enemy, of course, but magnificent. Like hawks sparring in air.”

“Flying is so dangerous. I read that British pilots—”

“I know. Most don’t survive the first week. What do you expect if you send boys up with less than a day of instruction? But imagine a
trained
pilot, skilled in every weather, a master of his craft, matched with a fine machine. If America enters the war, wouldn’t it be better
to fly and not be a trench rat?” Tom stood straighter now, eyes glittering. Even Lilli looked up. “Whatever they say in town, there’s no finer gentleman than the Baron von Richthofen, but his country’s tearing the world apart. Even he knows the Kaiser is a beast, leading an army of beasts. He must be stopped.”

I stepped back. Didn’t he realize that I was one of
them
? “You’re busy. Perhaps I’d better go.”

Tom turned so quickly that Lilli jerked to attention. “Please don’t, Hazel. Perhaps you could—sketch Lilli for me. Here, on the grass.” At Tom’s command, Lilli sat.
Let it go. He’s American. He can’t help thinking as an American.

“I’ll have to try some angles.”

“Sure. We have plenty of time, don’t we, girl?” he asked Lilli. “And we won’t talk about the war.”

I sketched Lilli’s ears and muzzle, legs, haunches, and luxurious plumed tail. With the last of the sun, I secretly drew Tom’s high cheekbones, dark froth of curls, and strong fingers gripping a carpenter’s pencil.

“What kept you?” grumbled Anna when we came late to supper. “I hope you’re hungry.” Yes, we said like bad children, we were hungry.

The baron’s “some days” in New York stretched beyond a week. A constant flow of telegrams and terse telephone calls directed my work, but still I had time to finish the study of Lilli and begin a series on textures: folds of velvet curtains, ornate picture frames, and sunlight on marble busts. With every sketch, I thought, I’ll root my peace in this place. Still, watching from my upper room as night mists rolled over the orchard, darker images came to me: Ben’s face when his voices called, jealous seekers at my house, and children leaving the schoolhouse, never looking back.