The Rags of Time (12 page)

Still, the Federal house is not her home; and the broad stucco villa on Lundstrasse is not home, though she can tour every room with portraits of ancestors, all men with trim whiskers, several with military honors of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Dürer woodcuts were hung between mirrors in the dining room. So predictable, Inga said to her new friends in New York, and so dreary—
Death of the Virgin
.
Passion of Christ!
Well, Inga would rather not partake of
Melancholia
with her schnitzel,
Danke schön,
and one day said as much to her husband, whose home the villa was in every detail. The famous etching of that brooding angel with her mystical apparatus and a sleeping dog at her feet remained in its place. Each room replays with its legend, how her father turned the incident of the Dürers to his benefit when an emissary of Cardinal Innitzer came to lunch. Otto was allowed to sit at the table while Sylvie had been instructed to kiss the Bishop’s hand, then sent belowstairs. Yes, Albrecht Dürer was son of a goldsmith, his iconography decidedly Protestant. Now his art graced the walls of a Catholic silver-mine family, a step down in the metallurgical table. An amusing story told by Neisswonger and retold by Inga with a mocking smile. Later, much later, Sylvie would understand the anecdote was not about the Master of Nuremberg or his works, gloomy though great, but about the slights a country girl of no account often suffered having married the honorific von with a sloping Hapsburg jaw, about how Inga dare not speak in the presence of the prelate come on behalf of Innitzer, who folded when the Germans appended Austria, about a move already in process had she looked up from her Apfelstrudel to advise the Jews to pack up, or simply noted the collapse of the Empire in a fistful of marks dealt out for a loaf of bread.

When they were first in New York, her mother told the Dürer story with a good deal of invention: Sylvie waited at the door with maids and the cook for the Bishop’s departure with a young priest who bestowed a final blessing on all. She was summoned to watch the emissary drive off in the big black car flying the Austrian flag—red, white, gold of the imperial eagle. Or that may have been her mother’s invention, but this memory was Sylvie’s, told at last to Louise: the day her father and brother were taken, she had watched her mother dissolve in tears.
Mommi, Mommi,
she cried, as her mother’s gray-green eyes blinded with sorrow. Her full lips, ripe for laughter, puckered to a sore. Sylvie would dream her mother’s face over the years, drowning in tears, gasping,
Otto. Otto.
The last time Inga would speak her son’s name, casting Sylvie off with a swift thrust of her arm to quickly compose herself, Frau von Neisswonger on the phone with arrangements, a forgiving smile for her girl who believes it was this day when her mother, no longer Mommi, became Inga, co-conspirator and pal. And they had lived on in the villa for some weeks, eating like mice in the kitchen, spare meals brought in by a loyal maid. Packing and unpacking their bags, would they need lavender soap, warm hose or sturdy sandals? Inga, silent and calm in preparation as though they were going to take the waters, splash about in the refreshing Seebensee.

Flying over the vast expanse of America, Sylvie indulges herself in this dream tour of a house, polished copper pots in the kitchen, full canisters—
Zucker, Kaffee, Honig
—while many were lucky for a potato, a crust of bread. No good can come from this scrapbook of plenty. She stands at the door of her father’s study where bound books lined the walls, each with its gold title, and the atlas lay open to the map of the Austrian Republic, 1918, the beautiful blue Danube fading on the lectern by the window with a view of the untidy garden rippling in sunlight. Now she enters the pretty bedroom of a small, scrappy girl, her Steiff animals outgrown, her dolls abandoned at a tea party, suitcase packed for the life of exile soon to come. Her father and brother taken. Neisswonger had spoken against the Chancellor, who stalled for time while Austria welcomed the invasion. Papa wrote letters against that very Cardinal who played word games with the Vatican, trifled with Mussolini, which gave a bitter twist to Inga’s amusing story: how easily her Ulrich was swept away like so much dross from his silver mines. And could he not see that Catholic Austria was running out of time like the hourglass in Dürer’s engraving?
Melancholia,
the hefty goddess with her scientific apparatus, unable to figure life-and-death equations? But why her son swept into the ashes of history? And what good to never say his name?
Otto.

No good at all figuring, not even as an unburdening, though once the villa was revealed in detail to Louise Moffett, who’s as close as Sylvia Neisswonger Waite will ever come to having a daughter. No relation at all. Louise is the wife of the grandson of her lover, Cyril O’Connor, which is more distant than the second cousins twice removed recorded in the genealogy of the Neisswongers, all those lofty connections. Louise did not mourn the vanished Dürers, or a little girl’s room with a tea table and white coverlet on the bed, or the anxious weeks out of time lingering on in the villa, but cried for the spoiling, the word Sylvie chose to convey her memory of the soldier’s rough hands on her body, the harsh scrape of his brass buckle. He had not taken his tunic off, only pulled down his britches to accomplish the act.
Beflecken,
too often in recent days, the German word came to mind, would not allow the plain English. She, who once had the gift of tongues, a translator at the UN, German to English, English to French. In telling of the soldier’s weight upon her, she lapsed into the concealing hush of childhood, what must never be known. She believed he had bristle-blond hair, that his eyes were ice blue, though he covered her face with a pillow; then she heard his boots stomping downstairs, coarse laughter. Whispering to Louise as though Cyril stirring in the cradle might hear that her father’s books were thrown off the shelves, his wine cellar desecrated, the silver service carried off, and, most surely
Melancholia
and
The Passion of Christ
wrenched from the dining room walls. That night, when the soldier was through with her, she had wiped herself on a soft linen towel embroidered with the von N. Then, possessed of a miraculous will, she dressed in the inappropriate velvet frock her mother had set out for their voyage, woke Inga from a deep sleep, led her down the back stairs, out across the terrace and neglected parterre through a hole in the garden wall, thank God never mended. For years Sylvie would hate her small body, shun intimacy, though later she slept around, as they used to say, strictly unserious business, until she met Cyril O’Connor, but that was another story not told to Louise Moffett, only that she was loyal to her husband, Bob Waite, who took care with her, was attentive and kind.

The lost city is no longer real, Innsbruck only a setting for a fable told to her friend—the towering Alps at a distance, the villa garden in disarray.
Unnatürlich,
her father called the clipped box laid out in a stiff maze. The handless statue of a goddess blessed a plot of roses gone wild. Thorns and a dry fountain. She was allowed to play with a few friends in this confusion while Inga poured tea
à l’anglais
for their mothers.

Lou listening to a story more mysterious than a whodunit read before bedtime, a tale that would never provide the desired solution with each strand folded into an end. Otto would always be framed as a boy, lifeless as a studio photo; or the faint human skull, a prop in Dürer’s staging of a depressed angel with that skinny dog sniffing her feet. Two women together in a loft on Lower Broadway, tea bags soggy in their mugs, not art history with slides and a term-paper answer—Louise had cited Panofsky—to demonstrate that reason is defeated by imagination, or was it the other way round? In
Melancholia,
that is, not the insoluble history of this afternoon’s tale.

And how my father disliked the order of that garden, its geometric paths, labyrinth that tricked no one. He had been, in his youth, a mathematician.
But Sylvie took that no further, returned to Inga working better millinery at Saks to pay for their rented room before she assumed her glamorous refugee disguise.

 

 

 

Inga, the farm girl with the stench of goats and sheep still in her nostrils, was not much for nature, and not much for pouring tea. Did she long for the shops and cafés of Vienna? For the operettas and balls she presumed as her marriage portion? Surely she had bargained for more than a husband who closed the door to his study to read journals written in a language of numbers and signs. The city on the river Inn no longer honored Ulrich Neisswonger. His mines had been appropriated by the state, though once he had walked with his daughter to the Silver Chapel, not with Inga or Otto, just the two of them, an occasion so rare. It seemed strange even then, walking through the old town, her father in his British tweeds worn each day, now that he did not go to his office. He tipped his
Tirolerhut
at merchants and bowed to a lady in mourning along the way. Yet so informal with his daughter in tow, the many smiles of that morning,
Guten Tag
. When he pulled back the leather curtain at the door of the church—not the church Inga took his children to on Sunday while he read of problems in his mathematical journal—the altar shone upon them, a girl and her father not come to pray.
From our Alpine mines,
he said proudly, all of the silver latticework on the high altar before them gleaming with Christ and triumphant signs of the zodiac. Sylvie looked long at the prettiest figure, Virgo, the month when she was born.

But I never found those secrets, only guessed them from movies, from novels. I know he was angry at the Cardinal, who ordered the Nazi flag to fly over the chapel, and that I wore a dirndl that day, costumed for a dark plot, not
Sound of Music.

A story told when she traveled to the loft to help out with Cyril sleeping in that wooden cradle, the possession of all those Waites on their hill in Connecticut. It was the one thing she appropriated from their store of useful Yankee things. Now Cyril was in school, and when it came cradle time for Maisy . . . she recalls the apologetic sigh when Louise returned it, beautiful certainly, no longer useful. Maisy lay in a padded Moses basket woven of plastic straw, an ingenious contraption with many pockets, zippers, and handles to haul her about. Louise had carried the cradle down to Sylvie’s Jeep, parked illegally on Lower Broadway. A packing-up day, the time of the Freemans’ move uptown to be near the University so that Artie might go on with his studies, his note of purpose redressing his truant past. On the day Sylvie told of her childhood home in the Tyrol, she did not give the full tour of her father’s study. Louise was invited to view the map of the Hapsburg Empire well in decline, but her guide left out the mathematical journals neatly stacked by her father’s reading chair. To touch even their pale blue covers was strictly verboten by order of the silver-mine master who turned through their problems at night. The cradle was returned to its proper station by the fireplace in Connecticut, an artifact for a phantom child.

 

 

 

Now Sylvie walks the aisles of the plane as instructed by Bob Waite. So march she does up to the blue curtain denying her entry to the superior classes. She takes in her fellow passengers sleeping or enduring this time out of time. Seat-belt signs on, she lurches through turbulence, gives way to the moment of fear that Bob Waite laughed at, then delivered the stats proving safety in flight. Jed has stowed his computer, put up the small screen with the plane consuming the red line through eastern Pennsylvania, where a flight on its way to destination unknown—White House? Camp David?—met its fate. Bob had died well before that terrible day, his statistics never figuring hijacks or security fuss at airports.
Mein lieber.
She had lived under his protection, a stranger in the national landmark of his house, his history of good family with names of teachers, bankers, ministers recorded in the Waite Bible never consulted, their worth, worthiness—
Wert, erhaben
haunting the purity of Federal rooms. The stale breath of humankind is heavy in the cabin. After her marriage Sylvie flew first class to visit her mother in one extravagant new house or another, improbable as pictures in slick magazines. Inga Meyer, channeling Ingrid Bergman with a touch of Zsa Zsa Gabor, had made her fortune by way of husbands. The silver mine, a brave if failed start; then on to the rewards of Hollywood and Texas—movies, born again oil—a true American story. The Baroque mansion in Houston, where she finally came to rest, was fitted out in Secessionist glamour, Austrian bentwood chairs, a mantel clock (Adolf Loos) that flung the minutes away with a sleek brass pendulum, all said to be like if not the very treasures confiscated from the villa. The depressing Dürer woodcuts were banished from Inga’s story. The dining room in River Oaks displayed George Grosz’s decadent posturing, while her daughter, the prim translator, cut into a bloody steak.