Angels All Over Town (23 page)

“Jason, what would our ladies’ luncheons think if they knew about you?”

“It would disappoint them beyond all measure.” He kissed the tip of my nose. Sometimes Jason surprised me; just when he seemed to hit the depths, he would pop up in a great mood. Sitting beside me on the plane, he was humming. “I have to be careful with the army guys, though. They are hostile. I used to live in Washington, D.C., and about five hundred marines stormed into our bar and tore us to shreds.”

“Well, marines. They’re different.”

Jason shook his head vehemently. “No, it’s the uniform. It gives people a sense of power. They start thinking they can control everyone’s life. I had fifteen stitches.” He patted his hip. “Stab wound. I am lucky to be alive. Army, marines…they’re all the same. It’s better to lay low. Of course half of them have prurient interests themselves, which explains why they go so overboard. I mean, you’ve heard of protesting
too much
? Well, they doth.”

I laughed. “Be careful, then. At least we don’t meet this group on the base.”

“No, in the hotel banquet room. Most likely we shall be spending the rest of this little jaunt in banquet rooms. So I advise you to get loose in your spare time.”

Jason cheered me up. By the time we arrived, in yet another limo, at our hotel in Bad Cannstatt, a spa just northwest of Stuttgart, I felt less crazy. I watched the scenery with interest: tall black smokestacks ringing the city; billboards advertising Bosch, Daimler-Benz, and Kodak; finally the woods, gardens, vineyards, and orchards to the north. If Stuttgart was an ugly city, Bad Cannstatt, with its mineral springs and neoclassical Kursaal in the Kurpark, was a lovely suburb. We arrived during the midst of the Cannstatt Folk Festival.

A gala, carnival atmosphere pervaded. Our rooms at the Alfie Haus were neither charming nor disgusting: two double beds, a color TV, and a private bath in a half-timber building designed to look like an American’s idea of a Bavarian ducal hunting schloss. We entered, and Jason immediately started talking to our handsome blond bellhop. They were engaged in a rapt conversation (Jason speaking no German, the bellhop speaking very little English, making do with a smattering of French and much body language). One of the carnival’s brass bands marched below the hotel’s windows. I sat on the edge of one double bed, listening to the raucous music and the receding voices of Jason and the bellhop.

Leafing through the hotel’s brochure, I learned that masseuses were available at the hotel’s mineral baths. A massage! My neck felt tense and sore from travel and worry. I gathered my bag and a thin white towel and went off to explore the Alfie Haus.

The Alfie Haus: one standard-issue link in a chain of hotels. Probably American-owned. On my travels promoting
Beyond the Bridge
, I had stayed in Holland Houses (hotels built to look like windmills); Western Hospitality Inns (motels with an Old West theme: cactus and roadrunner wallpaper, a huge plastic cactus outside the office, tacoburgers in the coffee shop); Galleons (housekeeping cottages whose facades looked like the stern of a brigantine. If you saw these buildings side by side, you would think you were sneaking up on the Spanish Armada). So I did not need directions to find my way through the Alfie Haus. I knew how the patterned red-and-blue carpet would blur to purple in certain badly lighted areas; I knew that the pine-veneer-paneled banquet rooms would flank the hotel dining room (in this case called the Goldene Traube); I knew that the desk clerk would nod at me, then go on watching the festival through the window; I knew that just past the front desk I would find a long corridor that would lead me to the indoor pool, the mineral baths, and the masseuse.

Chapter 14

N
aked and choking on steam, I sit with two other fräuleins in a vat of seltzer water. Nudity has never bothered me; I stare at their breasts with interest. Each has furrowed pink nipples like mine. Years back Lily started something called “Giving the Tit.” Driving down Route 15, she would flash one breast at the oncoming traffic. We never knew whether anyone actually saw it or not, but it exemplified our fascination with breasts. Whenever Margo burped, she would say the word “Brrrrrreast.” Lily never burped.

The two German women know each other. Each is holding her brown hair up with one hand, and interrupting the other in a frantic conversation about someone named Sigi. They ignore me totally. I close my eyes, letting the hot water effervesce against my clitoris, and think of Sam. Alone with Sam in a bubbling mineral bath, visiting Bad Cannstatt for the cure…my mouth opens as I await his lips, and here they come, kissing mine; together we sink down into the warm water, pressing together, bubbles everywhere. He is Domingo and I am Anya. The thought is so erotic, I nearly come. If the two women were not here, I would touch myself. Instead I climb out and pat my pink body dry with my thin hotel towel.

The masseuse, a large strawberry blonde named Wanda, greets me. She spreads some plush towels on a silver table that reminds me of the collapsible metal one my family used to use for picnics, and I climb on. Face down, I close my eyes, and let those muscular arms knead me as if I were dough. I am pale enough. I would rise into a loaf of white bread, but my crust would never brown. It would look as if someone had scraped my top layer off. The hands push my muscles. Ouch! I say. That
hurts
! But it has to hurt a
little
, Wanda says in good English. You have knots.

I have knots. Knots bind, don’t they? Bowlines, half hitches, granny knots, clove hitches, sheet bends, overhand knots, figure eights…I knew them all. At eleven I had learned to sail a Bluejay, and I would practice knots by the hour. I could make that boat fast to any dock you could find; I would practice tying knots for hours and hours with a length of clothesline. Even during the winter!

So, you have been here before? Wanda asks in an accent that suddenly, alarmingly, reminds me of Lily and Henk’s maid, Ilsa. I don’t feel so safe anymore. Perhaps my shoulders got tenser, because Wanda chops then with the edge of her hand.

Where, to Germany? I ask.

Yes. Or to this hotel.

This is my first time in the country. It is very lovely. (I say, although I have seen next to nothing of it, and I have a strange feeling of danger. But I was taught to always be polite to my host.)

I have lived here always.

But your English is so good!

Yes, good, but I learned it in school, not in America or England. The farthest I have been is to Spain. Once I went to the Costa del Sol.

Spain—I’ve never been there. We’re going to Italy later in the trip.

Quit talking now, Wanda says, chopping me again. You have too many knots.

That afternoon I sent a postcard to Lily and Henk. “Be sure to tell Ilsa that Germany has a lovely countryside,” I wrote, certain that Ilsa would read the message herself and save the Voorheeses the trouble.

I strolled through the festival, which stretched through the Cannstatter Meadows along the brownish Neckar River. There were booths attended by women wearing folk costumes, long floral-printed dresses with bodices that pushed their white bosoms up so that they spilled like beer froth over the fabric’s edge; stands that sold wurst (knockwurst, bockwurst, bratwurst) and lager; brass bands with schoolboys pumping great lungfuls of air into enormous tubas; games of chance and skill; flower vendors. Leaves on the trees had started to change from green to shades of brown and yellow. I found the scene oddly colorless.

A patch of grass beside the river was unoccupied, and I took it. Staring at my notebook for a few minutes, I tried to write to Sam. I told him about the plane ride, the festival, the mineral baths. How I had wished for him to be with me, warm and close in the bubbling water…

Absence does not make my heart grow fonder. It makes my brain grow more mazed, my heart grow more distant. I lose the strength of my confidence. Sitting by the Neckar, I listened to an oompah band play a polka and felt utterly melancholy. Jason hurried past with the bellhop, now apparently off duty: he had changed out of his uniform into a black turtleneck and tight black trousers. They looked avid, as if they were late for something. Jason would forget Terry in the stud garden. I would moon over Sam while staring at blank paper, but I was far from forgetting anything.

Jason claimed he did not sleep either of the two nights we stayed in Stuttgart. Between meetings with junior army wives, the St. Peter’s Mother’s Group, and the many factions of officers’ wives’ clubs, I steered clear of the mineral springs and read guidebooks in my room. I daydreamed about
Together Forever
and reread the script. Lying on one of my beds, all four pillows behind my head, I would keep my ears cocked for Jason. I wished he would drop by and talk to me.
Now
I was ready for a phone call from Margo and Sam, even one reading me the riot act. Why couldn’t the “Celebrity File” have been a few days late in reporting the latest romance? Why couldn’t Margo have exploded with righteous indignation now instead of then? Now I was prepared to calmly explain what had happened, to tell Sam that I loved him and that the press was just feeling its oats. Tell him calmly and with some amusement. That telephone call had ruined everything. All I could do now was hope that Emile Balfour would be kind and make me Anya.

Of all the places Jason and I visited on our whirlwind tour, Nuremberg was the oddest. I had strange nightmares and a sense of déjà vu the entire time we stayed there. Sliced in half by the Pegnitz River, Nuremberg has an evil, medieval air about it. Moated city, fairy-tale turrets, damsels in distress, Brothers Grimm, witch’s castle, gargoyles, Nazis. The city of Albrecht Dürer, it is also the city of Albert Speer. I felt instantly that I had been there before. I had dreamed of it or had seen it in picture books.

These streets: they echo with the sharp heels of storm troopers. The voices shouting, instructing, recruiting, demanding the citizens to unleash the final solution. Singing allegiance to Hitler. Der Führer. Outside the city is a mammoth stadium where they used to shout the word. Dragging, screaming, scraping, shouting, building, unleashing. Human evil. But there is something else.

Driving in from Stuttgart, I asked the chauffeur to stop in front of the Holy Ghost Hospital. It has a Crucifixion Court. It gave me the shivers. I sat in the back seat, leaning forward, staring at the ornate building whose foundations reached into the riverbed, for several minutes before Jason told the driver to drive on.

“What is with you?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I answered, but I did. My father had bombed Nuremberg during the war. Before he became a real estate man, before he married my mother, before he sired three daughters, he had been the navigator-bombardier of the Eighth Air Force’s lead plane. Perhaps this building, built in the fourteenth century, contained the ghosts who had inspired my father’s nights out. The real Blue Danube coursed just a few miles south. Wasn’t that significant?

My father trained for the Air Force with a bunch of college-age boys, fighting for their country, afraid of dying, afraid of killing Germans, wanting to kill Nazis. They were sent to England. Misty, green, proud England. Their base was on the Wash, north of London. They lived in a metal Nissen hut that was never free of dampness. They played cards and took leaves in London, where they stayed at the Mayfair, went riding in Hyde Park, got drunk in Piccadilly, saw shows at Covent Garden, kissed girls on Blackfriars Bridge. They flew missions over Germany and dropped bombs through the clouds on cities they could not see, cities that were only coordinates on their charts.

When the bombers flew into German airspace like a formation of Canada geese, my father’s plane would be at the point of the V. On one mission, he bombed Nuremberg. Sent the wounded, many of them not Nazis, to the Holy Ghost Hospital. My father was twenty-three. No wonder he would always find his way back to the Blue Danube. If you think in terms of pilgrimage, it begins to make some sense.

I thought about my father a lot in Nuremberg. I visualized him not as my father, not as a ghost, but as he had looked then: in his Air Force cap and brown leather bomber’s jacket (with the Eighth Air Force insignia and first lieutenant’s bars), his big grin and soft brown eyes smiling out of his skinny face, his protruding ears, his long Cavan nose.

Whenever I thought of Sam, whose letter hadn’t arrived, I would shake myself up and say how can you think of
that
when your father bombed
this city
. It became the perfect avoidance tactic.

I wished mightily for my father’s ghost to visit me. It didn’t. Instead I stood on the stage with Jason and talked about my soap opera father, Paul Grant.

DELILAH
Oh, Beck…my father will never forgive this jail break. He believes so strongly in the justice system. He promised me I would be free on appeal. In some ways he is so…innocent.

BECK
Delilah, darling. Darling. There wasn’t
time
to wait out an appeal. We knew about the prison uprising. Did you want to get caught in the crossfire? Don’t you imagine that Delilah Grant would make a first-rate hostage? Did you actually think that I would
stand by
and let that happen?

DELILAH
(
docile
). No, I can’t imagine that…my strong love. You are so good to me. You’re risking everything…you know that?

BECK
I know that. And your father will understand. Paul Grant is a good man. Soon we will clear your name and come out of hiding. Soon, my love.

Our audience cheered, and some wept. Every woman there had a father and had known, at one time or other, how it felt to disappoint him. Standing on that stage in Nuremberg, entertaining the troops’ wives with scenes from my soap opera, I was disappointing my father, James Cavan. He had once told me, Lily, and Margo that we should never visit Germany. Flying alongside the Concorde, he had avoided mentioning my stops in Germany. Of course he would never appear to me here.

By the time we reached Vicenza, Italy, our last stop before returning to Paris, I had stopped writing to Sam. Every time I thought about my movie audition, I broke out in shivers. Would I be good enough? Would I be able to improvise? I had learned improvisation, but would I remember how? I felt sure that I would remember
if only
I had graduated. Graduates can improvise, dropouts cannot. Graduates can pull situations out of hats and make them real. If you told Susan Russell to improvise, to act like a drunk mother whose children are home from boarding school for Christmas, she would give you gin and mistletoe. Emile Balfour would tell me to act like a nervous actress auditioning for her first movie role, and I would flop.

I wanted the part so badly, I walked the streets of Vicenza pretending to be an Italian banker, the wife of a colonel in the 509th Airborne Infantry, a miner in San Francisco for the gold rush. I wanted to prepare myself for the moment when Emile would say, “Roll ’em!” What harm had been done by that crazy night at Palace? None. I wanted to become his next star. I lay awake in the hotel hoping for it. Voices carried up from the Piazza dei Signori, and I imagined them talking about me. I stared at the white plaster walls, wishing to be adored. I would see my name in reviews and on movie marquees. Wherever I went.

But then my mind would drift to Sam, to our nights on the promontory at Watch Hill when meteors streaked through the black sky and bioluminescent seaweed flashed in the tidal pools, with Sam holding my hand and our toes gripping the salty rocks. We had kissed a lot. We had talked endlessly, and our conversations played themselves for me in my mind. About our families, about New York, about acting and oceanography. I thought of his slim back, his messy black hair, the way his fingers felt on my shoulder. The smell of his skin. The pillowcase I had brought to Europe to remind me of his scent was now as bland as old laundry.

Sam Chamberlain. I thought with wry, detached regret how sad it was that our time together had been so brief. We hadn’t had time to forge a strong relationship. We had not really fallen in love; it had been mere romance. It had been the romance of the sea, of September, of the rocks, of the foghorns. Margo the matchmaker: her rare roast beef had been for naught. I lay awake in Vicenza, thinking of how things drift away. My father, literally, was ash, drifting in the sea. My mother, as usual, was drifting in her own watercolored world. Lily had married Henk, and she was drifting toward motherhood. Margo would drift away after she married Matt. And Sam had drifted away as abruptly as he had arrived. The ebb tide was swifter than the flood. One by one, the people I loved would all leave. But if I became a big star, at least I would be adored. You saw how they followed Emile Balfour, I told myself; you saw how they stared at him as if they knew him. They love you as Delilah, but that was different. That was limited. Lonely women, American women, who tuned in daily. I wanted to be adored worldwide. Lying in bed, I thought of my faceless public adoring me, replacing Sam. He had probably already given me up. I thought that, but I lay awake, watching the headlights of passing cars arc across my ceiling and hoped hoped hoped. Hoped that everything I feared would not be true.