The Uninvited (15 page)

I hesitated. Laying my head down on his legs in such away would suggest tenderness. Nurturing companionship. Even love.

“Are you sure you want me to—?”

“Lie down.” He patted his lap again. “It’s all right. No one is coming in here to arrest you for being with me. I swear. People have better things to do right now.”

I lowered my head against his leg, and my cheek settled against his trousers. My legs stretched across the sofa’s smooth linen, and I reached my toes as far as they could go before bumping the curved arm. The smoky scent of his fireplace settled inside my nose, and I remembered how I used to believe, with such terrible prejudice, that all German homes smelled of beer and sauerkraut.

“Am I keeping you from the shop?” I asked with my eyes half closed.

“I worked all night. I think someone might be coming by to measure for new windows this afternoon, but this morning”—he laid the palm of his left hand against my hair—“I plan to rest, too.”

“Were you hoping to open the store back up soon? I heard the APL say—”

“No—don’t say those three letters anymore. They’re officially banned from paradise.”

“All right. That’s a reasonable request.”

He stroked my hair and made my scalp tingle, and I felt as though we were playing at husband and wife. I wondered if Wyatt and Sigrid shared such moments together. Or my mother and father—before we children came along.

“Ivy,” he said, breaking the delicate silence.

“Mm hmm,” I murmured, on the edge of sleep.

“When you first came to the store, you said you’d been sick.”

“Yes, I had been.”

“With this flu?”

“Yes.” I sighed through my nose. “At first, I thought I wasn’t feeling well because of the news of the death of my brother. I fell ill the same day we received the telegram about Billy.”

Daniel’s hand came to a stop above my ear. “Did you suffer much? From the illness?”

“No.” I shook my head. “At least, I don’t remember too much about it. My temperature spiked to a troubling number, apparently, and I remember my family sitting with me, holding my hand. At one point, even Peter, my . . .” I cleared my throat. “The brother who caused trouble here . . . he brought me flowers. My mother kept watch over me”—I nestled my head further against Daniel’s legs—“deep into the nights.”

“But you weren’t in pain?”

“I hallucinated and slept and shivered, all of that awful stuff that comes with the flu. But I was never afraid, because I didn’t know this flu would be such a vicious killer. I don’t even know how I managed to contract it.” I stopped and opened my eyes, and my stomach clenched. “Oh, God.” I shot up to a seated position. “It must have been one of the children I teach. They’d come to my house for lessons, and—” I slapped my hand over my mouth. “I wonder if whichever child it was . . . I wonder if he—or she—is still alive.”

A second ambulance tore down the street outside the window. I jumped and covered my ears and heard the engine squalling through my brain.

Daniel left the sofa and clicked open a cupboard door on the Victrola’s mahogany stand. I removed my hands from my ears and watched him sift through dozens of record sleeves that crinkled from his touch.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Aha!” he cried. “
Da ist es!
”

“What are you saying?”

He stood up straight and slid a record out of a thin tan sleeve. “I’m going to play my favorite song for you so we can both block out the world outside. It’s my fault for bringing up the
verdammt
flu.”

He lowered the record onto the phonograph’s turntable and wound the silver crank on the right-hand side. With the gentlest of movements, as when he had picked up his guitar during my first night in his bedroom, he leaned forward and placed the needle onto the crackling grooves.

“ ‘Slippery Hank,’ ” he said, lifting his face toward me with an arch of his left eyebrow, “by Earl Fuller’s Famous Jazz Band.”

A second later, one of the fastest and most frenzied jazz songs I’d ever heard volleyed across the apartment walls. A cornet trumpeted, and music zigged and zagged all over inside of me.

I laughed. “That’s marvelous. It sounds like watching a circus while on cocaine.”

“You’ve tried cocaine?”

“No, I’ve just read newspaper articles about it. Or—I know—the sound of people chasing each other around in a Fatty Arbuckle comedy.”

“You like the song?”

“I love it.”

He plopped down next to me on the sofa again, and I lowered my head back to his lap. The clatter and chaos of the outside world fell away—no more ambulances, no wagons ambling down the street with the dead wrapped in sheets. The wood-paneled walls and little brick fireplace, and even the brown burlap curtains blocking out the sun, seemed to brighten and nestle us closer together.

Once again, it was simply Daniel and I and beautiful, boisterous jazz.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

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....................................

Chapter 16

E
ventually, we retired to his bedroom and slept in his bed the entire rest of the day. Not once did I awaken until the band from the Masonic Lodge sent its nighttime music sailing through the thin glass panes of Daniel’s window. The pull of Nela and Addie and our transports drew me out of the snug sheets, where I had slept with Daniel’s right leg over my left one. I washed my face in his bathroom and borrowed a swig of mouthwash to make up for my lack of a toothbrush and the fuzzy taste in my mouth. My skirt and blouse from the day before replaced the comfort of his oversized striped cotton pajamas.

“Are you leaving already?” he asked from the bed, dressed in only a pair of white pajama bottoms. He stretched his arms over his head and looked so lovely with his bare chest and mussed-up hair, I felt half-tempted to jump straight back into bed with him and continue hibernating.

“Nela and Addie, those Red Cross volunteers, will be counting on me to drive the ambulance again tonight.” I sank my backside down on the mattress next to him.

“Stay a little longer.” He raised himself up to a seated position. “Why hurry to rush back into hell?”

“I promised them I’d help.” I reached forward and sifted my fingers through the close-trimmed hair above his left ear. We had never before sat and just looked at each other like that, I realized, face-to-face, eye-to-eye. I stroked his soft curls as if I’d known him for years, and even though, for whatever reason, he had inflicted his personal punishment upon himself, banning himself from kisses, he rubbed his lips together in a way that conveyed a need for me to lean my face close to his. I bent forward and pressed my mouth against his mouth, and for the first time in our short yet intimate relationship, we kissed.

He froze, and his breath fluttered through his nose in a quiet patter, breezing against my cheek. When I lifted my head, he turned his eyes away and inhaled a sharp breath.

“How old are you?” I asked.

He looked at me again. “Why do you ask?”

“You suddenly seem so much younger than before.”

He adjusted his weight with a creak of the bed. “I’m twenty-four.”

“Really?” My mouth fell open. “You’re a year younger than me?”

“You’re twenty-five?”

“Yes. I thought you were older.”

“No.” He shook his head. “Just twenty-four. I feel decades older, though, and I probably look it, too. I’ve already pulled out a few white hairs after leaving Germany.”

“No, you look just fine.” I stroked his hair again and tried to read the stoic expression in his blue eyes, which watched me as much as I watched them. “You must have been no more than twenty when they put you in the army.”

“I left home for war on my twentieth birthday, but I certainly wasn’t the youngest one in the army.” He lured my hand away from his hair and rubbed his thumb over the backs of my fingers. “Don’t ever think of me as an innocent babe, Ivy. As anyone back home would tell you, I was a hellion who craved girls, booze, and adventure from far too young an age. I was begging for trouble.”

“If I asked you why you left Germany . . . and the war”—I gave the strained smile of a person who’s certain she’s bound to encounter rejection—“would you tell me?”

He turned his face away again, toward the bare wooden wall.

“Were you injured?” I asked.

“I left Germany”—he swallowed—“in 1915, but there’s no need for me to say anything more about it. That’s all over now.”

“I’m not going to betray any of your secrets to the authorities, if that’s what worries you.” I cleared my throat and felt heat rise to my cheeks. “I’m not even the first person I’ve known to take a German lover.”

He didn’t respond, or move, so I continued. “My friend Helen—”

“Helmut Weiss’s mistress.”

I sat up straight. “You know about Helen and Mr. Weiss?”

“Helmut is my father’s cousin. That’s why Albrecht moved to this specific town after he left Germany—after his wife and baby died. He wanted to leave his troubles behind in Deutschland but still be close to family.”

“Oh. I didn’t realize that.” I blinked a few more times and tried to digest the connection between Daniel and Helen’s German. “Well, anyway,” I continued, “last July I went to see a motion picture with Helen—I don’t even remember which one, something with Douglas Fairbanks in it—and one of those Four Minute Men got up in front of the audience while the projectionist changed the reels.”

“
Ach,
I really hate those Four Minute idiots.”

I smiled. “I’ve never been fond of them either. This one gave his little speech about Liberty Loans or saving peach pits for gas masks, something along those lines. And Helen leaned over to me and said, ‘I’m worried someone will hang Mr. Weiss like they did Robert Prager.’ ” I sighed and shook my head. “At the moment, I didn’t care a fig about Mr. Weiss. I just thought of him as a lecherous, forty-year-old German adulterer who should have never involved himself with one of my friends. Now I have to wonder, though”—I sighed again—“what was his life like over here? Was he a good man, deep down, despite his flaws, if someone as smart and vibrant as Helen fell in love with him?”

A little pucker of discontent formed between Daniel’s eyebrows.

I nudged the back of his hand. “What’s wrong?”

“Do you know who reported Helmut to the American Protec
tive League and lied about him failing to buy Liberty Bonds?”

“I thought we weren’t bringing up the APL anymore.”

“You brought up Cousin Helmut. It’s impossible not to talk about him without mentioning those
Schweine
.”

“Who, then?” I asked. “One of his customers?”

“No, his American-born wife. She found him with his hussy back in the bakery kitchen and immediately went to the authorities. Those terrible APL idiots showed up at his store and instructed him to leave town or else suffer dire consequences.” Daniel glanced at me out of the corners of his eyes. “There’s a prison camp for German-American civilians at Fort Oglethorpe in Georgia. Another one exists at Fort Douglas in Utah. At one time or another, we all received the threat of detainment, but that didn’t worry any of us half as much as the real possibility of a lynching.”

I swallowed the taste of bile and muttered, “Helen Fay wasn’t a hussy.”

“And Helmut Weiss wasn’t a traitor. He was just a
Dummkopf
who cheated on his wife.”

I lowered my head and kneaded my lips together.

Across the street the band played a song I recognized, “Nightingale Rag,” and I wondered what it would take to get Daniel to join me over in the lodge, just to escape all that talk of traitors and prison camps and lynching. He covered my right hand with his hot palm and managed to slow my breathing. Until that moment, I hadn’t even realized my lungs were contracting and expanding at a brisk and unhealthy pace.

“Never mind all that.” He swallowed. “Come back early in the morning, after you’ve finished carting those poor bastards around town. Sleep here again.”

“I should probably pay my landlady first, so she doesn’t think I’ve run off. I was supposed to be the first-ever boarder of the Dover Home for Women of Independent Means.”

“Haven’t you run off?”

“I don’t know.” I managed a half-hearted grin. “I honestly don’t know where I belong anymore. No place feels quite right.”

“Bring your things to my place. Stay here.”

I shook my head. “I can’t live here, Daniel.”

“Why not? We’ll be no worse off than Helen and Helmut.” He snorted. “Oh,
Scheisse
. Even their names make them sound like a comical, doomed pair, no?”

“Precisely. They
were
doomed, and we’ll be no different. The authorities ripped apart her apartment and threw her across the room. I don’t even know if she’s alive anymore.”

He squeezed his hands around mine. “Stop worrying about everyone and everything. Come live here and drink away all your woes with me.”

I pulled my hands out of his and shifted sideways on the bed. “I don’t understand you.”

“What?” He leaned toward me. “What don’t you understand?”

“You won’t kiss my lips or tell me a thing about you—why you’re not in the German army anymore, who your parents are. Yet you want me to abandon my last precarious remnants of respectability so we can live together in sin.”

“It’s not sin.”

“Yes, it is.” My voice turned louder than expected, echoing off the walls. “To the rest of the world I’ll be a hussy, like you just said of Helen. People like Lucas will keep calling me the whore of a German spy.”

“I am not a spy.”

“How do I know that? What proof have you ever given me to show that the German government didn’t send you over here to—?”

“I’m a deserter.”

I stiffened. “What?”

His jaw hardened. “I’m a deserter. I’d be executed if I ever returned to Germany. My parents don’t even know where I am.”

“You deserted the German armed forces?”

He nodded.

I gasped. “How? How did you not get killed?”

“I very nearly did—several times. But I made it. That’s why I’m here.”

He didn’t elaborate, so I sat back on my hands and let the ragtime music settle inside my blood, longing to find a way to lure more of his story out of him. I imagined myself as a magician in a silk top hat and Daniel’s history as colorful scarves I could draw out of his sleeves and view in all their clarity.
Truth is a torch,
as the poet Goethe had warned, but I didn’t care if Daniel’s stories scorched and blinded me.

I wanted the truth in one giant dose.

Daniel pushed the sheets off his legs with a sudden movement that made me stiffen. He climbed out of bed, put on his undershirt, and with a leonine grace that betrayed nothing of his status as a deserter and a refugee, he sauntered over to his guitar. I watched him ease down on the other side of the mattress with the instrument poised on his lap. He fussed with the strings and the knobs for no more than a minute, and then he strummed a subdued version of the jazz band’s song that drifted through the window.

“It was during a furlough back home,” he said as he played, his back toward me, his shoulders rocking with the smallest fraction of a sway. “Instead of returning to my post, I burned my uniform and somehow managed to escape to Holland without getting shot. Then I snuck aboard a steamer bound for New York. I hid down in the dark filth of a coal bunker and traveled at sea like a rat in a hole for nearly two weeks—nearly died of starvation. I honestly don’t know how I made it here alive. I arrived in America as a sack of skin and bones.” He withdrew his left fingers from the strings and swiveled in my direction. The music across the street played on without him.

“That’s why I could never enlist in the U.S. Army,” he said. “The newspaper article got that one detail correct: I never registered for the draft. I’m a wanted enemy of the Fatherland, and I can’t return to Europe.”

My lips parted to respond, but then he added, “I killed a great number of people in the war, Ivy. I’m not worthy of a kiss from your lips, so don’t ever feel you’re being deprived of something sacred if we never share the type of love you might be hoping to share. I’m a killer and a deserter, and no one wants me in their country. Not Germany, not America or Canada or any other place involved in the war. I’m considered an enemy of everyone.”

I trembled from head to toe, all alone on my side of the bed, and the battlefields of Europe had never edged so uncomfortably close to Buchanan, Illinois.

Daniel lowered his guitar to the floor with a soft tap of the wood against the boards. He sat up straight again and said, “I can’t allow myself to love you. But I’ll continue to take away your pain, if that’s what you need of me. God knows, you’re saving me from my pain.”

“I’m glad,” I said with my shoulders hunched, my voice cracking. “I’m glad I’ve helped.”

He walked over to me on silent footfalls and stroked the hair above my right ear, as I’d just done to him. “Do you want me to give you a quick tumble before you leave?” He leaned down and kissed the top of my head, spilling a chill down to my toes. “So we can forget this ugliness? Would that help?”

I nodded, and even though it made no sense to pull down my drawers after hearing his grueling accounts of hardships and near death, I couldn’t get my underclothes off my legs fast enough. Daniel tugged down his pants and laid me back on the edge of his bed. While the jazz band wailed a song as frantic and fervent as “Slippery Hank,” I wrapped my legs around his waist and imagined the two of us as sticks of kindling, striking together, desperate for the taste of fire.