“The Royal Game.”
“It’s wonderful, don’t you think?” Lizzie said. “Yesterday, I read a lot of The World of Yesterday. The way he describes living in Vienna before the wars—”
“Actually, I’m not a fan,” Rose said. “Zweig’s writing is too mannered, too sentimental, especially in The World of Yesterday. Not everything was so wonderful before the wars as he claims it to be.”
“Oh,” Lizzie said, deflated. Sentimental? “I see what you mean; it felt nostalgic, but I kept imagining him fleeing Vienna, being forced to move from one place to the other, then down in Brazil . . .” She trailed off, feeling self-conscious. Had she offended Rose?
“And that double suicide,” Rose was now saying. “I am sorry, but suicide is always a coward’s way out. Such a selfish act.”
Lizzie nodded, reluctant to argue. But what if a person were gravely ill, with no hope of living? What if she were truly suffering?
“I had a cousin, my father’s first cousin, although he wasn’t all that much older than I, who took pills when he was basically still a child,” Rose was saying. “Eighteen, nineteen. A brilliant, sensitive boy. There were rumors that he was gay, though no one called it that. His mother never got over his death, of course. She had an opportunity early on to get to France, but she wouldn’t leave Vienna, said she would wait until the family could all go together. Everyone said it was because she wouldn’t leave her son’s grave.”
“That’s awful,” Lizzie said. “I’m so sorry.” Her mother was buried in Westchester, in a large Jewish cemetery that stretched over a series of gentle hills. She hated how far away she was from it when she moved to L.A., hated thinking of how barren the grave would look in winter. “I’ll take care of it,” her grandmother had told Lizzie without specifying what she was referring to, but Lizzie knew exactly. “How old were you when you left?” she asked Rose.
“Eleven.”
“It must have been so hard.” When Lizzie was eleven, her mother was newly sick. A revolving mix of sitters—it was hard to distinguish them apart, they turned over so often—picked up Lizzie and Sarah from school, took them to skating and ballet lessons. They were often late. Once, one never showed. After waiting more than an hour and calling home and getting no answer, Lizzie caught a ride with an older male cousin of a classmate. She didn’t know the guy but he had been waiting around school (“sometimes I help out with soccer practice,” he said) and he offered. Her mother went ballistic when she found out. Then her grandmother moved in. “For the time being,” Lynn had said.
“My brother and I were put on a train, together, to England in the winter of 1939,” Rose was saying. “After the Anschluss, after Austria was annexed by Germany. I should like to say that Austria was invaded, but it was decidedly not.”
The slight wind felt welcome against Lizzie’s warm face. She had read about those trains, seen a documentary on PBS about them, maybe. Trains filled with Jewish children, ferrying them out of Nazi-occupied Europe. “Kindertransports,” she said.
“Yes,” Rose said, “that’s what they’re called now. At the time, there was no name for it. They were just trains that we were put on.”
“Of course,” Lizzie said. Rose had said this nonchalantly, but Lizzie felt as if she had blundered.
“I’m not blaming you,” Rose said with little hesitation, her fingers at her necklace’s amber beads. “You didn’t name them.”
Lizzie let out a nervous burst—part cough, part choked laughter. “No, I certainly did not,” she said, and realizing that Rose might take her laughter the wrong way, she added: “I’m sorry; I know it’s not funny.”
“That’s quite all right. You can be funny.” Rose did not seem thrown by Lizzie’s unease. Disagreement seemed to enliven her. The wind ruffled the loose white hairs haloing her sharp, finely lined face. There was something striking about her, not one thing in particular, but the way she carried herself, the sum of her parts. “You do remind me of your father, you know.”
“I do?”
“Yes, you’re quieter than he was, more controlled—”
“Controlling, he’d say.”
“But just as smart, just as interested in the world,” Rose continued. “And curious about others around you.”
“Thank you,” Lizzie said. “That’s nice to hear.” It was more than nice. “I bet it would make him happy that we were together. And talking about him—he would love that we were talking about him.”
“Yes, exactly.” Then Rose added: “I don’t know why he didn’t tell you about me. He spoke about you and your sister all the time. He told me that he wanted us to meet.”
“I don’t understand it either,” Lizzie said, but she had her guesses. Neither she nor her father liked talking about the stolen painting; it had been such a painful time. She liked to think that Joseph didn’t tell her about Rose because he wanted to spare her the reminder. But she feared there was a darker impulse at work: he hadn’t mentioned Rose because despite everything, Joseph still blamed Lizzie.
Rose reached the corner before Lizzie. There she gazed over the intersection, hands on her hips as if surveying hostile territory. “We’ll turn here,” she called over her shoulder, and waited for Lizzie to catch up. “Though I was touched that he left me the masks.”
“He must have known how much you admired them.”
“No, not really. I’ve only seen them once, at his house, many years ago, when we first met. But I think it was a nod to the Soutine. African art was all the rage in Paris at the time Soutine was painting. He and his contemporaries turned to African art for inspiration. Obviously it’s clearer with Modigliani, but it was true for Soutine all the same.”
“I can’t help but wonder if my father left you the masks because he couldn’t give you the Soutine back.” It was hard for Lizzie to say but it was, after all, the truth.
“Something like that,” Rose said. Now she was the one looking away.
They walked on in silence. They were passing a large brick apartment building with a colonnaded front, unusual in this neighborhood of small, one-story houses, when Rose said, “Do you know what aggrieves me? This apartment building. It offends my sensibilities, and it has since it was built. Why the columns? If you’re doing something in brick, leave it brick. If you want to go rococo, then by all means do that. But the two together, in this instance especially, do not work. It’s like crossing a giraffe with a monkey. Why try to be something that you’re not?”
Lizzie started to laugh. They would be friends, she thought. They would be.
“I am serious,” Rose said.
“I know you are,” Lizzie assured her. She imagined standing in Max’s kitchen tonight, glass of wine in hand, telling him, She’s not like anyone else I know.
“I’ll tell you what I want right now,” Rose said. They were nearly back at Third Street, back where they started. “Coffee. How does that strike you?”
“Like a seriously good plan,” Lizzie said.