“Sit,” Marianne commanded when they had reached the covered part of the porch where a set of mildewy wicker furniture was grouped like so many pigeons, facing the sea. “Alice will bring it.”
Martin complied. From here, one could see down to a short, T-shaped dock, sticking like a cross into the water. The sun on the rocks was strong and bright.
Marianne lowered herself into the armchair opposite Martin, which looked as uncomfortable as his. Comfort, it seemed, was no more relevant to Marianne now than it had been when she was young.
“So how are you, Marianne?” Martin said, trying to strike a jovial tone.
“Oh, Martin,” she said, sighing. “As well as possible for a person of my age. I am a lucky woman.”
“Not old at all,” Martin responded, aware as soon as he said it that she would find the statement ridiculous. “You look marvelous.”
“Thank you.” Marianne bobbed her head patiently. “And what of you, Martin Fledermann?” She smiled. “It was New York, I think, where I saw you last, no?”
“Yes, it was,” Martin said, the day coming clear in his own head with her prompting. He had gone to see her in some big, featureless building on the Upper East Side where she had been living at the time. They drank tea and ate buttered Pfefferkuchen and looked out over the city through a drafty picture window, surrounded by all the old things—dark Biedermeier armoires and claw-footed tables, thick white embroidered curtains, and the dusty needlepoint portrait of Grossmutter von Lingenfels. Martin had just divorced his second wife, a subject he had been preoccupied with not discussing and that now loomed over the memory as if in fact she had been there—a lovely, sorrowful presence, full of reproach. The rest of the visit, what he and Marianne had discussed, how she had looked, was obliterated from his mind.
“You were working on something—a book—I can’t remember the subject now.”
“Ah yes, right.” Martin nodded. “I’m still working on it.”
“Still?” Marianne raised her eyebrows. “The same book?”
“The same book,” Martin tried to say with self-deprecating humor, but it came out sounding bitter. The truth was that the book had become the bane of his existence. He had begun his career as a professor with a burst of glory—a lauded first book about postwar anti-Fascist architecture, various academic prizes, and tenure at a well-regarded American university. But then he was gripped by a crippling stiflement. He was meant to write a book that came to terms with something larger than the architecture of renewal. He was meant to write a book that would, in some way, relate to his father, the hero and resister. But that book refused to come.
He leaned back and was rewarded with a stab of broken wicker into his spine.
“That is a long time.” Marianne frowned, studying him.
A probing silence threatened.
“How did you come to this place?” Martin asked. “It’s so . . .” He searched for the word—primal presented itself, but Marianne was too German—he was too German—to use the word without discomfort. “Obscure,” he filled in.
Marianne laughed. “It was difficult for you to find, I think.”
“No, no.” Martin tamped down his instinct to bristle. “I mean, just this corner of the country—it’s not anywhere Elisabeth and Katarina come, is it?”
Elisabeth and Katarina, those dark-haired girls he had spent so much time with as a boy, now lived unfathomable lives in the brash, historyless American west. They too had been drawn here, to this continent of new beginnings, fellow children of Burg Lingenfels. Of the von Lingenfels family, only Fritz, a copyright lawyer at an international law firm, remained in Germany.
“No, no, Katarina vacations in Mexico—or the Caribbean.” Marianne waved his question away. “And Elisabeth doesn’t vacation.”
“Well, it’s a long way from Burg Lingenfels.”
“Ha! I should say so.” Marianne laughed. “And you are in New Hampshire still, I understand from Irena—she is in better touch with me than you are! She sends a Christmas card at least.”
“Does she? Irena?” Martin was startled. He tried to imagine his daughter, the inscrutable suburban schoolteacher she had become, writing to Marianne.
“Every year, last year with a picture of her babies—those sweet little things. To think you are a grandfather, Martin!”
Martin shook his head. It was incredible, actually. He was only fifty-two. Irena was a child of his youth. He had been too young, only twenty-four when he had her, and now she was a mother herself—also too young, in his estimation. Fatherhood had slipped between his fingers, and time hiccupped forward. Now here he was a grandparent. Too late! Too late! Grandparenthood taunted him. You can’t go back and be a father now.
“I’m not a very good one, I’m afraid,” Martin said.
“Ach.” Marianne waved this away too. “I’m sure you are.”
Martin said nothing. Sitting here, on this weather-beaten porch, with its brittle railings and the dull pounding of the sea below, he felt a gray bloom of failure. This was why it had been so long since he had last seen Marianne. She was the gardener of this ugly flower. She knew just how to turn its face to the sun.
He was relieved to hear Alice opening the screen door, bearing a tray with Marianne’s good coffeepot (pale blue with tiny white flowers, how familiar it still was), a carton of half-and-half, and two practical white mugs that had replaced the Meissen china of the old days.
“Have we no pitcher for the cream?” Marianne frowned. “This looks not fine.”
“No, ma’am,” Alice murmured. “No pitcher.”
“Ach, well. So it is.” Marianne sighed. “But surely there is a sugar bowl.”
Alice nodded and returned to search for one.
“She is Rwandan,” Marianne asserted when she had left. “Her husband was killed in the civil war there. And her son.”
“My God. How terrible.”
“She is very good. Very honest.”
Martin nodded. Marianne had always been comfortable with such sweeping moral pronouncements.
“You see,” Marianne said, smiling, “I like always to surround myself with widows.”
“I suppose so.” Martin tried to smile back.
“I miss your mother, you know,” Marianne said. “She was not one for a houseful of widows.”
The comment jarred him. He was so rarely around anyone who spoke of his mother.
“But she lived in one,” Martin said.
“I think of that man she saw,” Marianne continued, fixing her gaze on the dock. “After the war. The ex-Nazi.”
“Herr Muller,” Martin offered, though his own memory of the man was hazy at best. He had been astonished when Marianne told him of his mother’s affair, so many years ago. But he had not been alarmed. His own memories of the man were positive. He had shared his Christmas chocolate with him on that long-ago day.
“I was very hard on her about him,” Marianne continued. “I think, if she loved him and he loved her . . .” She shook her head. “This is the main thing, isn’t it?”
At that moment, Alice reappeared, carrying a cereal bowl half filled with sugar.