Around the World With Auntie Mame (19 page)

“Oh, thank you. But I should. When we were very little, my brothers and I had an English governess on our estate and, until the war broke out, I had a few years in an English boarding school. Of course I was very young then but . . .”

Auntie Mame's door opened and she sailed out in a clatter of violet taffeta, her middle tightly cinched. “
Gut'
Morgen,
mein Kavalier
!” she said with a coquettish wag of the finger that recalled all the operettas I'd seen that week.

“
Gnädige
Frau
,” Putzi said, clicking his heels smartly and kissing her hand.

“
Aug
Wiedersehen, Liebchen
,” she said to me with a maddening wave of her scented hankie. Then they were off.

I spent the day combing Vienna for a cup of coffee that wasn't hidden under whipped cream. When I returned, defeated, there was no sign of Auntie Mame. It was after six when she rustled in.

“That must have been some lunch,” I said. “What was it today,
Hühnerleber mit Speck und Reis
under
Schlagober
? I thought the doctor told . . .”

“Not now, my little love,” Auntie Mame sang. “Putzi's asked me to dinner and the opera and I've simply got to
tear
into my clothes.” With that she disappeared and I could hear her singing the great love duet from
Die Pillangóprinzessin
.

With a clicking of patent-leather heels, Putzi reappeared, this time in flawless evening clothes and so handsome and aristocratic looking that even I was a little startled. Instead of being the thick-necked, shaven-skulled, dueling-scarred, yellow-haired type I'd always associated with the Teutonic peoples, Putzi was tall, dark, and rather romantic looking. He had beautiful manners and an easy laugh. While he awaited Auntie Mame he told me about the boyhood he and his brothers had spent on the family estates in Mähren, which I gathered was Moravia, before it was turned into Czechoslovakia. Now, it seemed, they were on a much smaller estate in the Tirol. It was all very romantic—just as romantic as Putzi. He was beginning to recount his cadet days at the Theresianum when Auntie Mame sallied forth, looking just like a Winter-halter portrait. “
Auf Wiedersehen
, my little love,” she said, kissing the top of my head. “Baron von Hodenlohern and I are off to dinner and the Staatsoper, but I've left our tickets for the Volksoper for
you
. I know you'll adore it. It's by Kalman or Lehar.”

“Or Romberg or Friml or Straus or Strauss. It won't make any difference,” I said.

She swept up a sweet nosegay of Parma violets, gave her girdle a surreptitious tug, and they were off. “That dear Patrick,” she said to Putzi, “such a lover of gay, Viennese music.” I took the tickets and flushed them down the toilet.

IT WAS FIVE-THIRTY BY THE LITTLE TRAVELING clock on my bedstand when I heard Auntie Mame let herself in.

“My God,” I called, “did you sit through the complete works of Wagner?”

“Still awake, Patrick darling?” Auntie Mame said as she drifted into my room. She sat dreamily on the foot of my bed and gazed at her crushed violets as though she were a very hungry cow about to devour them. “Oh no, my little love, it was only
Der Rosenkavalier
. We left after the second act.”

“Well, it took you a hell of a long time to get back across the street.”

“Ah, my little love, Putzi hired a carriage and we went out through the Vienna Woods to a dear little outdoor café where the gypsies serenaded us and we had
Gespritzenes
. Too divine.”

She looked as though she'd had a lot more than that, but I didn't say anything. She hummed a few bars of some dismal
tzigane
dirge and then she said, “How was the operetta, darling?”

“Oh, it was just
keen
,” I said acidly. “It was about a lovely Balkan empress who disguises herself as a shepherdess and . . .”

“Isn't that nice,” Auntie Mame said dreamily. “I wish I'd seen that. Go on, my little love.” She hummed again and I knew she wasn't paying any attention at all. From there on I improvised.

“Well, it's called
Die Krankenhauskaiserin
. The sheep all come down with anthrax and die, so little Stigmata—that's her name—and the villain, Baron Charlus, change clothes with each other and run off to Vienna where she gets a job selling contraceptives at Walgreen's-im-Prater and falls in love with a homely corporal who's disguised as a Balkan archduke, and she, little realizing that the Moxie which the wicked sorceress, Dichotomy, gives her to drink has turned her into a hopeless Lesbian . . . damn it,” I roared, fetching her a boot with my foot that sent her sprawling onto the floor, “you're not even
listening
!”

“Oh, I
was
, Patrick, really I was,” she said, blushing prettily. “It's just that . . . well, I mean I . . . Patrick, pack your things. We're leaving Vienna just as soon as Ito gets here with the car.”

“Leaving? For where? New York?”

“No, Patrick, for Stinkenbach-im-Tirol.”

“For
where
?”

“We're going to Putzi's old family place—Schloss Stinkenbach—for a little visit.”

TWO DAYS LATER WE ROLLED INTO THE VILLAGE OF Stinkenbach-im-Tirol. Stinkenbach was about three hours' drive from Salzburg, from Innsbruck, and from Bad Gastein, but proximity to more attractive places had not caused it to thrive. It was halfway up and halfway down an alp and situated just so that it was neither above nor below the clouds, but always
in
them. I mean it was humid.

The Rolls lurched into the church square just as mass was letting out, and all I could think of was the opening number of every operetta I'd seen since we hit Austria. The jolly peasantry—a thousand strong—were promenading the
Kirchenplatz
all dirndls and
Lederhosen
and apple cheeks. Bells were ringing in the hideous old gothic church and there was even a genial old lush with drooping mustaches hefting a seidel of beer in front of the local inn. I almost expected them to burst into song.

“
Ach
!” Auntie Mame cried, “so
gemütlich
. Just as Putzi said, fourteenth century—the whole village—and doesn't it have flavor!”

Indeed it had. From a glance and a sniff I realized that Stinkenbach-im-Tirol had no plumbing and no sewage system.

Then all the picturesque burghers parted and there, at the wheel of an antique Mercedes touring car, was Putzi. After an affectionate but restrained greeting, he loaded us into his automobile and started us out on the final lap of our journey to the fourteenth-century seat of the Von Hodenloherns.

“And now we start upward to Schloss Stinkenbach,” Putzi said, throwing his old car into low gear.

“Heavens,” Auntie Mame said, “is
all
this land yours?”

“My family's,” Putzi said with proud modesty.

Well, it was quite a lot of land. The only thing wrong was that it was all perpendicular. Way, way up over us loomed the ruins of an old fortress. That was the original Schloss Stinkenbach. Somewhat below that stood a huge Frankenstein's castle kind of place, so grim that, at first sight, it had an imposing grandeur. Putzi's Mercedes whined up the mountain, with Ito following. Finally we came to a ramshackle stone hovel with a pair of decrepit gates permanently rusted ajar. An old gaffer in
Lederhosen
came hobbling out and actually
did
tug his forelock. What I took to be his wife bustled after him, shooing a lot of chickens off the roadway. “Here we are,” Putzi said genially. We drove on past some rickety outbuildings and the car stopped before a hodgepodge of masonry, plaster, timber, arches, eaves, beams, buttresses, battlements, and turrets. It was Schloss Stinkenbach.

When the huge, iron-clad door swung open we were in a lofty stone hall, sparsely furnished with ugly carved wooden pieces, black with age. The plaster walls, painted with mottoes and family arms, were bristling with antlers. A towering tile oven in one corner gave off a wistful warmth. Otherwise it was chillier than it was outside. Beneath the feeble, unflattering glow of an iron chandelier stood two men and a woman. They were Putzi's brothers and his sister-in-law.

“Ah,” Putzi shouted merrily, “the reception committee! Mrs. Burnside, Mr. Dennis. Here is my family—all of it—the last of the Von Hodenloherns. My elder brother Maximilian, my younger brother Johannes, and Maximilian's wife, Frieda. Maxl, Hannes, Friedl.”

I noticed that, as in everything at Schloss Stinkenbach, Friedl, the reigning baroness and hostess came in last. She was a weary, washed-out blonde whose Dresden prettiness had long since faded as she faced menopause and melancholia with a grim, unhappy resolve. Friedl seemed always to have a cold—not that I blamed her in that house. She wore a dingy white cardigan over her unbecoming peacock blue “best” dress as she stood hugging her elbows and shivering in the drafty hall. I did the Austrian bit, clicked my heels somewhat more successfully than usual, and kissed her cold, red hand.

“
Enchanté
,” Friedl said between chattering teeth.

Maxl, the head of the family, was dark like Putzi, but far less attractive, being fifty pounds heavier and ten years older. He wore English-style country clothes that were much too tight and a hairnet. Hannes, the baby of the family, was only a few years older than I. He was one of those Teutonic-god types, lean and muscular with azure eyes and golden curls. He would have been the handsomest of the lot save for the total absence of any animation or warmth in his chiseled face and his frosty eyes. Taciturn to the point of muteness, his social repartee consisted mainly of jerky little bows and nods. Not that his manners left anything to be desired; it was simply that Hannes always made me feel that I was in the company of a very well-bred robot.

“Did you open the salon, Friedl, as I asked you to?” Putzi said.

“
Ja!
Yes, Putzi. Poldi did the
Kamin
—uh, the, er . . .” Friedl, whose English was not as good as that of the Von Hodenlohern brothers, groped for a word.

“Stove,” Putzi translated. Then he turned to us with a winning grin. “As you probably know, central heating is not popular in Austria. All over we are heated by our beautiful old porcelain stoves.”

“How charming,” Auntie Mame said, beaming at the family.

“Now please to ring for Poldi, Friedl, and you can show our guests to their rooms.”

Friedl tugged at a moth-eaten old bell cord, and a harried-looking peasant woman of unfathomable age scurried in, gathered up our bags, and labored up the stairs.

“Follow me, pleece,” Friedl said.

It was some trip, up stairs, down stairs—no two rooms in the
Schloss
seemed to be on the same level—and along dank, echoing corridors. The house was an eccentric structure, to say the least, with rooms, wings, and ells added on at random over the centuries. There must have been more than a hundred rooms in Schloss Stinkenbach, although most of them were closed off, locked against everything but icy drafts. Auntie Mame's room, up on what seemed like the fifteenth floor, was a snug Biedermeier affair. Mine was down the hall, a perfectly circular stone affair in what had possibly once been a defense tower. There was even a sort of battlement running between our two bedrooms—Auntie Mame called it a terrace— providing more fresh air than seemed absolutely necessary and what Auntie Mame referred to as a “panoramic view of the valley.”

“Isn't this old storybook castle too incredible, darling?” Auntie Mame said, bursting into my room a few minutes later.

“It certainly is,” I said. “It puts me in mind of those happy days at Count Dracula's old place.” I surveyed my round bedroom again, its cold stone walls, the embrasures, the vaulted ceiling. The bed looked like a flamboyant gothic tomb. A sinister carved piece that appeared to be an iron maiden turned out to be a clothes cupboard. It was the sort of chamber where Jan Hus might have been terribly tortured by one of the earlier ecclesiastical Von Hodenloherns—of which there were many—before being put to the stake in Prague. A primitive fresco of some unidentified martyr undergoing a kind of surgery I dread even to think about heightened the effect. I couldn't help wondering where they'd put poor Ito. But Auntie Mame thought that everything was too perfect for words.

“Ah, my little love, the centuries of
Kultur
that have gone into creating this gracious family seat. I hope you realize, Patrick, that we have the honor of being entertained by one of the oldest families in Europe. The Von Hodenloherns are legitimately descended from the Hapsburgs, laterally descended from Barbarosa, and illegitimately descended from the Babenburgs.”

“Poor bastards,” I said.

“Why, darling, they're so blue blooded that the only people fit to associate with them are in the Kapuziner-gruft. You know, Patrick, that tomb in Vienna where all the Hapsburgs are buried.”

“Well, I'll bet that tomb's a lot cozier than Schloss Stinkenbach. Nice for a visit, of course, but I wouldn't want to live here.”

“Come dear, we'll try to find our way down to the salon. And mind your manners. Theirs are so very, very beautiful.”

After a trip of half an hour or so we finally came to an imposing pair of doors giving into the
salon
. It was a Maria Theresian folly of the eighteenth century that looked like the rooms in Shönbrunn Palace or the Hofburg, only not as well kept up. The walls were covered with a frayed brocade that hung in tatters in several places. At one end of the room a mildewed tapestry depicted a seventeenth-century Von Hodenlohern (Augustus-Christus, “The Muscular”) singlehandedly destroying the Ottoman Empire. The ceiling, except for some wet brown patches, was covered with an allegorical painting of one of the churchly Von Hodenloherns (Franz-Leopold, Prelate of Pilsen) climbing to heaven with the aid of six cherubs over the mangled corpses of some undressed Protestants whose hash he had presumably just settled. Elsewhere there were about seventy portraits of dead relatives in helmets and breastplates, in velvet and sable, in miters and copes, buckling within their tarnished gilt frames. Across a choppy lagoon of rococo chairs, rickety little tables, pungent oil lamps, and fly-blown vitrines, the brothers Von Hodenlohern and Friedl huddled around a baroque wedding cake of a porcelain stove. It was the color and texture of a very old teapot and gave off just about as much warmth.