Rose and Harry followed him into a tiny, low-lit, windowless space dominated by a large industrial table ensconced in plastic. The air felt thin, stripped of oxygen. Rose grabbed for the edge of the table. “Auntie?” Harry said as he steadied her elbow. For a moment, she thought she might pass out.
There he was, The Bellhop, lying unadorned on the table, the boy in red on the flat canvas, just as she remembered, with his gold buttons and strange surly face and stretched-out limbs. It was him, absolutely.
But gazing at him for the first time in more than sixty years, Rose felt a dark expanding swath of fear. The thick swirling redness, his tiny mouth, dark eyes, the way he positioned himself at an angle against the rich background: the boy didn’t want to be here. She hadn’t remembered that about him. He stared resentfully. He didn’t want to be here at all.
Time folded in on itself, snaking, contorting. She saw The Bellhop in their Viennese flat, hanging on the wall in her parents’ bedroom, Papi complaining about it (“I should be the only man in here”). There was Mutti, at the piano, practicing a spirited Shubert concerto in the drawing room with the red velvet chairs and Herr Schulman by her side, murmuring, gut, sehr gut, watching her with hooded eyes. Rose remembered dancing alone in front of The Bellhop on New Year’s Eve when the lead-pouring went awry and Bette sensed the ugliness of the year ahead. She could hear Gerhard arguing with Mutti and Papi: The soldiers aren’t going to bother me. I’m going to see Ilse. I am. There they were, gathered around the dark oak dining table beneath the massive brass chandelier, Mutti and Papi and Onkel George and Tante Greta arguing about the wait at the American embassy. Mutti wanted to put their name on all the lists. We are not going to Argentina, she could recall Papi saying. Why not? Mutti demanded.
Rose remembered when she was younger, Mutti in the cot in the tiny room that was to be the nursery, her cries of pain, the doctor rushing past, Bette cleaning up the blood. Mutti asked for The Bellhop—that’s what she wanted, not Rose or Gerhard, but The Bellhop, by her side.
“Let’s go,” Rose said to Harry in a gravelly voice she did not recognize.
“But that’s it, isn’t it?” Harry said. Tandy too was studying her. “That’s the painting?”
Rose nodded, turning away from them, eyes back on the canvas. Here it was, after so many years, and all she felt was sorrow. She was an old woman. Her parents, so many people she had loved, had suffered. They were murdered. They had been dead for decades now. The Bellhop was paint covering a surface; that was all. “Let’s go,” she said to Harry, her voice barely above a whisper. She hurried out of the small room, past Lizzie and her sister, waiting beside the door.
“Rose?” she heard Lizzie call. “Rose?”
“I’m sorry,” she muttered, head down.
“Shall we stop for coffee? Is that pink palace of yours still in business?” Harry asked, back behind the wheel of Rose’s car.
“No, I want to go home.”
He cast a glance at her. “I know that must have been overwhelming, Auntie, after all these years, but—”
“Harry, please: I do not want to talk about it.”
He nodded. “It is good news, Auntie, unquestionably. After all of these years, you and Dad are getting the painting back!”
“It’s not ours anymore,” she said, and it was too painful to say anything more. “Technically, it’s the insurance company’s.”
“The lawyers will take care of that,” he said. “It’s very clear.”
She shook her head, slumped in her seat. She and Gerhard had already spoken about it. They would hire a lawyer here in the United States. But hiring a lawyer was the least of it. Cases like this could drag on for years. Rose was so weary, she wasn’t sure she had the fight in her. (Yes, you do, she could hear Thomas telling her. Of course you do.) Why in the world had she cared so much? This was what she had said she wanted for all of those years: This? A painting? After the murder of her parents, a painting was what she had focused on?
Even Gerhard had said to her, Mutti’s Bellhop, your Bellhop! You can have it back.
I don’t want it, she thought petulantly. The image of The Bellhop, lying flat on the table in police custody, made her seize up with shame. It wasn’t the painting she had wanted.
Harry drove Rose back home and clucked around the apartment, checking, Lord help her, if the milk in the refrigerator had not expired and turning up the heat (“Why is it sixty-five degrees in here? Why are you denying yourself the bloody comforts of the contemporary age?”). “Harry,” she said, “I like it this way. I am seventy-nine years old, not ninety-nine. I can still do things for myself.”
“It’s called concern, Auntie,” he said, and leaned down to give her a slide of a kiss. “Shall I order us dinner?”
“Bob is coming over. I’m sorry, but I’d like—”
“No need to explain,” he said. “No need to humor your poor, single nephew; I’ll eat alone, despondent, in my hotel room.”
“Harry,” she protested. The notion of Harry despondently alone was ludicrous. But what did she know, really?
“I’m only joking. Have your romantic dinner and I’ll be back tomorrow,” he said with a grin.
“Thank you,” she told him firmly.
After the door closed behind Harry, she called.
“So?” Bob said. “How was it?”
“It was something,” she said. “It truly was. I’ll tell you all about it later. But about dinner—my nephew wants me to join him, alone.” She lowered her voice as if Harry was still nearby. “I’m sorry, but he’s only in town until tomorrow, and he’s being quite insistent.”
“Oh,” Bob said with audible disappointment. “I would like to meet him, you know.”
“I know,” Rose said, and she felt a pulse of regret. Bob was a good man. He wasn’t Thomas, but he was a good man. Why was she pushing him away? “After everything today, I just can’t tonight,” she finished, honest in sentiment if not in fact.
After she got off the phone, she went straight for the kitchen cabinet with the bottle of Ardbeg—Thomas’s favorite. She loaded a coffee mug with ice cubes, tipped in a generous measure of the whiskey, and settled into the armchair with her Dick Francis mystery. This was what she needed, she thought. She read and she drank and she nodded off.
The lights were ablaze when Rose awoke, her heart careening, her limbs stiff. Where was she?
It was long dark by the time they had gathered in the field behind the station, the cold air biting. Mutti and Papi and Gerhard and Rose had taken the tram together and walked the last several blocks to the train station. The field was packed with people, children and parents and representatives from the Jewish organization. Dim lights bobbed up and down, flashlights carried by officials providing paltry illumination.