The Empress Chronicles (17 page)

Mozart, Handel, Beethoven. “How could you not love the greatest music ever written?”

Dad sighs. Turns his head so our foreheads touch and says, “That’s a question I’ll wrestle with the rest of my life, I think.”

The light aftershave smell of him and how solid his head feels against my head. I could sit here, in this concrete park, all day. My dad being my dad and not someone’s
boy
friend.

We’re quiet and still like that for a long time. A way we haven’t been together for months.

“Shall we?” Dad finally says, standing up, offering his elbow like some sort of old-fashioned escort.

I stand too, link my arm with his, toss the rest of my now-cold coffee into a brand-new, unsmelly garbage receptacle at the edge of the concrete park. The day’s clouds have already parted, and sun warms my face, baking a new season of freckles into my skin.

As spring turned to summer and the emperor’s birthday loomed in front of us like the final hurdle in a foxhunt, nerves throughout the Herzog began to fray. My sister’s somewhat dour nature turned anxious and fidgety. Indeed, most days Nené’s face lay slathered beneath a beauty cream of lard, marshmallow root and ground slugs; her dark gray eyes looked like tarnished coins peeking out of a ghostly dew. She’d begun to freckle, too, and Mummi had warned against the sun, so when my sister wasn’t covered in slime, she dabbed her face with milk and vinegar. Her hair, as usual, was completely covered in a silk bonnet, giving her the look of a nun at vespers.

Seamstresses were summoned, a new piano master. A fashion expert sent from Paris whisked through Nené’s closet and ordered that any dress with a mutton sleeve that gathered at the wrist be destroyed. Which meant, in actuality, Nené’s entire wardrobe.

“Puffy is the new gathered,” the fashion expert declared. “Everything in Paris is wide. Think flounce. Think floral. Colorful and patterned.”

My sister was of a conservative nature, and she was none too sure about festooning her modest and humble personhood with undersleeves and mantles and plaid brocade.

“Nonsense,” cried the fashion expert, who’d seemed to enjoy being frisked by Count Sebastian an hour earlier. He raised his ivory cane to the ceiling and called out, “You will be setting Vienna on fire; you must not blend in with the staid wallpaper of the Hofburg!”

“But I don’t want to set anything afire,” cried Nené, utterly overwhelmed. “I just want to marry the emperor.”

“My darling girl,” Mummi soothed. “You cannot have the cake without the consequence.”

All of Herzog, and indeed Munich—since word had leaked—seemed abuzz with the possibility of uniting Bavaria and Austria in this manner, and poor, shy Nené was at the center.

And all the while, watching my sister’s panic and the fuss that surrounded her, I thanked the heavens that it was she and not I in this predicament. With all the attention on Nené, I was free to sink deeper into my world of make-believe and write and sketch with abandon. And, more importantly, to ponder my growing attraction to Count Sebastian of Katrin.

A new sort of excitement—a galloping inside of me—consumed me when I heard the count’s voice outside my door, in the library down the hall, in the aviary beyond the classroom. When Nené took to reciting her French throughout the hall, the count and I would sneak glances at one another, snickering, for her accent was so poor. Her Germanic glottal pierced the melodic Parisian poetry, a German parrot trying on another tongue.

“Your sister needs to have more fun,” the count whispered while I pretended to advance a needlepoint. I nodded my agreement.

One day Count Sebastian noticed me adjusting the necklace of my keepsake—a nervous habit to which I’d grown accustomed of late, almost as if I needed reassurance that the locket was still in place, still on my person with its secret declaration. “Duchess, what has you so fidgety? Perhaps you need to have a little more fun yourself.”

I envisioned the portrait of the tart no man could win in my uncle’s
Schönheitengalerie
, how in her gaze was a sense of wonder and fascination that needed no admirers at all, and I attempted to push my mouth and eyes into that shape. When I’d practiced this earlier, Nené had asked if my stomach was bothering me. But now, it seemed to have an effect upon the count—one I wished to encourage.

He strode toward me with his dimpled cheeks and smile, his brusque manner, my potential hero, the guard of my person. “It was a year ago, Elisabeth, that you bore witness to the mob of that fox killing,” he said.

“I still have the brush,” I said and then, teasing, added, “Master.”

“Would it be forward of me to share with you my impressions of that day, Duchess?”

“Why, do tell,” I offered, expecting the usual recollection of my impertinence and high-minded eagerness.

But the count did not remind me of my defects, my unladylike behavior; instead, he looked behind him and walked over to close the great hall doors, thus stifling the sound of poor Nené and her pitiful French trying to swim its way through all the beauty cures and lard paste. He turned on his barely polished heel and walked back to me, not taking his eyes off of my face for a second. When he reached my chair, he offered me his arm. Which I took.

The count escorted me to the high windows of the hall, where before us lay our kingdom, the English Garden, the trees beyond the garden and the vast sky above all of it: Munich, Bavaria, the world. He said, “Sisi, your passion and spirit are like a summer storm that comes from nowhere. It crackles. It rumbles. It causes everyone in its path to forget whatever they were doing before its arrival.”

Baroness Wilhelmine had said something similar once, when I’d disrupted yet another lesson in deportment. But coming from the count now—his arm touching my arm—the crackle and rumble he spoke of being was now felt in my own heart, my personal body. This was a new disruption, one having nothing to do with deportment.

I longed to show him my secret. To reveal his likeness against my heart. The sketch of him in my journal. I yearned to say,
This is what came from nowhere. Your image. We belong together. It is fate
. But he would think me mad. As mad as my dear Amalie. So instead, I took in a deep breath, shut tight my eyes and offered a verse. One I had thought up earlier in the day.

Oh, to be as free as a faerie

To live in the belly of a dream

If it means I must stay stupid, so be it.

For reality is sour milk, happiness the cream.

When next I forced open my eyelids, my count had softened almost to the point of a lady, his jaw gone slack, his head cocked to the side. In one way, it was unappealing, but in another, extremely wonderful. Humility forbade me the pleasure of asking how much he liked it, so I said, “Is it that bad, my poem?”

“It is of your pure heart, my lady,” he said. But then he followed it with a hardened, “However, you must leave your childish notions in the nursery. Sooner than you think.”

My heart fell. “But why?”

Count Sebastian’s slack jaw firmed right up and he said, “The world has gone mad. Emotions run like a fever. Certainly you know that your own uncle fell prey to a vixen whose ambitions all but tore this country in half?”

He was speaking of Lola Montez. This might be my chance. Perhaps I could speak of my secret. I nodded, but the words would not come out.

“The Countess of Landsfeld,” he spit, as though Lola’s formal title were a bitter apple. “She seduced your uncle and, indeed, an entire league of revolutionaries, only to turn around and condemn the movement for freedom and education. She was a tool of the aristocracy and she broke many hearts in service to her own personal power.”

… You will be tempted to write of this eve, and you must not.

The gloves she’d given me so many fortnights past lay tucked in my credenza, secret and fallow as a winter’s field. “But that is all I want. Freedom. The freedom to live and love whom I wish. The freedom to go forth and run through woods and meadows without worry of assassination and doom.”

At the word
doom
, Nené’s bastardized French floated to our ears, her footfalls heavy in the hall.

Count Sebastian pointed in the direction of the choppy foreign verse. “She will discover, soon enough, that ruling half a continent is beyond serving cakes and tarts. More than strolling through the rose gardens of Schönbrunn.”

Oh, but this count was so handsome. Unyielding, strong. I closed my eyes, and the images of him collapsed to one. The sketch, the likeness in my locket, the way he sat tall and proud on his horse. And had he not called me beautiful? He was close enough that I bathed in his harness leather, cured meats and cedar scent. The smell of a man.

I turned to face him, opened my eyes and stood on tiptoe. To hell with decorum. Forget the rank and order. In that moment I cared for nothing, save the feel of his lips on mine.

I leaned in.

Count Sabastian backed away.

One thing I’ve learned over the last year is there’s the thing itself, then there’s the story about the thing. And those two realities never quite line up. What happens in that space between the thing and the story of the thing is why the mental health field is so lucrative, I guess.

I saw my official story once, in Dr. Greta’s folder when yet another of her emergency phone calls had her out of the room for ten minutes. Apparently, the whole
Liz/jizz
thing was a catalyst, and my misunderstanding with a gallery owner in the Pearl was a
precipitating event
. This was the story that lived in my permanent record, and it was someone else’s story.

The thing itself was different.

After the
jizz
incident I was so deep into cootie territory that my hands and feet just got numb whenever I thought about going to school. I began to vomit. Oh, probably at first I made myself do it, but after a while, all it took was a little melted cheese on toast in the morning, and up everything would come.

So Mom decided to homeschool me for the remainder of eighth grade. Dad had just moved out, so my homeschooling day began with Mom, catatonically puffing on a cigarette with a mug of coffee in her hand. Every few minutes she got up and put the mug in the microwave for a warm-up. She never really drank the coffee, just seemed to like the warmth of it against her hand.

She shoved the morning’s
Times
in front of me and mumbled, “All the education you need is right there. Make a list of your questions and once I’m myself, we can go over them.”

My chemically straightened hair hovered in plastic sheets near my cheeks, not quite touching them, and when I hunched over the newspaper my hair would teeter-totter forward, like a pendulum.

Every once in a while Mom would come up for air with a pronouncement: “What we need, darling, is a trip to Nordstrom. A little retail therapy.” Or, “Let’s spend the day on public transportation, just the two of us, see where we end up.” Or, “Into every crappy life, a little art must fall.”

Mom was all about art. She’d been a celebrated artist once, fought over by several galleries, until her medium, charcoal, fell out of style. For several years we’d lived off of her windfalls. We bought a nice house, had two newer cars. Restaurants every night. But then, her collectors stopped buying. Stopped asking her when her next show was. She got depressed. And then Dad moved in with Willow.

But her patrons didn’t entirely abandon her. The owner of the gallery that sold her work stayed by her side, encouraging her to try something different. “Combine charcoal with something else,” he said.

Mom’s depression went deeper.

The gallery was called Split Infinity, and the young gallery owner, Jeremy, was my best friend when I was thirteen. Once Dad left us, and I left school, I spent afternoons in the cool, dark space at the edge of the Pearl.

Surrounded by elaborately framed oils, glass-and-chrome photographs, granite and steel sculptures that moved on shiny springs—kinetic, they were called—I began to remember that I loved Vietnamese food, Mozart, the photos in the
American Heritage Dictionary
. Little things. Happy things. And there were so many.

Jeremy gave me tasks. He called me by my full name, Elizabeth, and sometimes simply “E” as though I were his partner; he asked for my opinion: Should the acrylic go higher? Should he consider a theme show? He told me to let my hair go back to its former curl. That it was oh-so-Botticelli, that it was inspirational. Like most gallery owners, he was a failed artist. But he still had faith that one day, he’d find his medium. His muse.

Mom got Botox and a tummy tuck and took some time off as his office manager, so I filled in. I answered the phone, “Split Infinity, how can we make your life wonderful today?” Jeremy loved that. I loved Jeremy. It was healthy. It wasn’t a
precipitating event
.

Until I made it that way.

Dad wanted to know why I wasn’t in school. He wanted to know why we sold the house, the house that was not in his name because it was Mom’s success that bought it. He wanted to know why we kept changing addresses each month, why I spent so much time with Jeremy, why, why, why, why?

Mom loved his concern—loved it! She loved sticking it to him about Willow, and she used the expression
cold day in hell
a lot. She went for full custody in the divorce, and she got it. She still had money. She had connections. She had attorneys.

It’s true, I had a giant crush on Jeremy, but it wasn’t sexual. Jeremy was sexually ambiguous. He was in several entanglements that year I spent almost every day with him.

But I was worried about Mom. She had become obsessed with her looks. So after she’d slapped down twenty grand for various upgrades, I asked Jeremy, “Do you think Mom looks younger?”

“She looks sadder,” Jeremy said.

“She is pretty sad,” I agreed.

Jeremy said that face fixing went back centuries. He reached up to a shelf of poetry he kept above his desk and pulled down Pope. “Ever heard of the poem ‘Celia’?”

This was one of the main reasons I loved Jeremy. His ability to choose from his vast storage closet of culture. Into any conversation, he’d find a piece of art: a poem, a sonnet, a cartoon. He recited, chopsticks in the air like a conductor,

Celia, we know, is sixty-five,
Yet Celia’s face is seventeen;
Thus winter in her breast must live,
While summer in her face is seen.

How cruel Celia’s fate, who hence
Our heart’s devotion cannot try;
Too pretty for our reverence,
Too ancient for our gallantry!

“Ugh,” I said. “That’s so heartbreaking!”

Jeremy nodded. “Your mother isn’t doing anything that women haven’t been doing since the beginning of Eros.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I guess one day, I’ll be in that boat. Yuck.”

Jeremy stroked my cheek, pushed the hair off my forehead and kissed me, impulsively I suppose, on the forehead. “Never, E. Not you.”

I moved my lips up to where his lips were. I misunderstood, I guess. I thought that now, we were suddenly a couple. That he had chosen me. The air around me had become sweeter, and I felt lifted off the chair. I kissed him back the way I’d seen a thousand leading ladies in a thousand films do.

Jeremy pushed me back, and my hand slipped down, my palm scratching as it met with his sharp metal belt buckle fashioned into a bird of prey. My hand began to bleed. “Oh, dear,” he said. “Look what I’ve gone and done.” He rubbed my kiss off his mouth and then grabbed my cut hand. “Let’s put some ointment on this.”

My head swam. I was dizzy. I felt like vomiting but held it in, and then pushed him back, slipping my bleeding palm away from his grasp. “I always ruin everything,” I yelled. I ran out of the office, knocked over one of the installations-in-progress, hearing it clatter on the hard enameled cement floor behind me. I kept running, out the door, down the block, and all the way to our not-home. The current loft-sitting apartment with a clean, well-lighted bathroom, where I could rinse Jeremy off me.

Mom came rushing in, having been alerted by Jeremy. She caught me sobbing, caught me with the faucet on, full force, the water itself keeping my skin from closing over the deep scratch. My heart burst open that day, and the disgusting ooze of who I was leaked out. I stopped eating. I spent the week in the bathtub, trying to rid myself of the filth—my filth, not Jeremy’s. And then, the following Monday, I was re-enrolled at school. Ninth grade. High school. A fresh start.

Back at the farmhouse, the week is busy. Willow secured a coveted booth in the upcoming Oregon Country Fair. A three-day hippie fest that rivals any Woodstock type of homage. Willow Creek Goat Cheese could get as big as Nancy’s Yogurt with this coup, Dad ventured. It was full-on production, all hands on deck. Our team of four became an assembly line, rolling curd into herb-crusted logs. I was down to forty-two pairs of gloves left in my box of one hundred. Willow fussed over the latex effect, claiming I was introducing allergens into the atmosphere. Whatever.

Cory, meanwhile, was vying for a reward for services rendered. The Saturday night coming up was the Darknights Parade, one of Portland’s signature events and “exhibit A” proof that our city was weird, and Cory wanted to go. The parade was full of lights and spectacle. There were odd floats, like the one made by the Skyliners Club, the members of which had to be over six foot three, towering men and women waving at bystanders below; the dental hygiene float, where human-sized tubes of toothpaste flung discs of dental floss into the crowd. It was so hokey. It was so Portland. And the parade route snaked right along 10th, underneath my therapist’s office window.

I thought a lot about Dr. Greta’s whiplash from seeing Empress Elisabeth as an object lesson for my improvement and healing to a source of regret. She went from wanting me to learn from this historic cautionary tale to stripping the story away from me. And I kept thinking, was it that suddenly the story about the thing was too close to the thing itself? Was the truth too painful for her?

She always spoke of the merits of desensitization for OCD cases.
Engage!
And now, with my interest in Sisi’s story, I did just that. I wanted into the middle of the mess. I wanted to read her diary and find out what made her crazy and sad, beyond what was written in
Death by Fame
. Cory knew a little about her legend. He told me, “They called her the Reluctant Empress. She was this bohemian chick forced into this super strict monarchy role. She hated it.”

The ripped-out diary pages I made Cory read over and over to me referred to a “magical faerie.” Some soothsayer named Lolo or Lola or Lila. It was hard to tell with the smudges. And Sisi had some nervous rash that broke out all over her hands. She tried to hide them.

“Who does that sound like?” Cory said.

And there was more. As he was wont to do, Cory dribbled out little trivia nuggets as they invaded his memory. “Her family invented Oktoberfest,” he informed me while we packaged the umpteenth half pound of fennel-crusted chèvre. And, “They were all inbred. Cousins marrying cousins. There were problems with their genes. Insanity and whatnot.”

The obsession of my obsessive-compulsive disorder was all about that diary. I had to see it, the whole of it. I had to hold her in my hands, Sisi, read what she wrote. I had to know what happened to the man she loved and how she allowed herself to be married off to someone she didn’t. I had to know if, like Dad, she had a disconnect between what she loved and what she was good at. What was the story? What was the thing itself?

And Cory understood. He knew without prying why I had to know. And together we hatched a plan.

“I’m not only entrusting you with my car, dude, but with my daughter,” Dad says, handing Cory the keys to his Volvo. With the fair a week away, he and Willow are 24/7 with the cheese. Dad’s building the booth, and Cory, with years of Waldorf woodworking under his belt, crafted a beautiful burl counter, sanded and varnished and gleaming.

“Don’t park anywhere near the route or you’ll get towed,” Dad cautions. “And no drinking. Of course.”

So on parade night, I find myself sitting a bucket seat away from Cory. Sort of like a date. The boy smell of him mixed with Axe, the same smell the boys at Lincoln splatter on. His hair gelled into spikes. He cleaned up. Did he do that for me? I don’t want to know the answer. But I sort of do.

I cleaned up too. Well, actually, girled up. I used some of Willow’s sparkle dust and had found an ancient tube of Maybelline mascara I had to add water to, to make it turn back to liquid. My hair, there wasn’t much I could do. I tried a barrette, but that looked like one of those baldy bands moms strap on their hairless infants’ heads so people know they’re female. I shoved on one of Willow’s knitted berets. I have a little bit of the French waif thing going on. Skinny as a heroin addict, so maybe, by some stretch of the imagination, I look hot. To someone.

But really, tonight is not just about looking pretty. I’m wearing running shoes and leggings because tonight is really about dexterity and mobility and I’d better not have one of my clumsy spells. “You got the tools, right?” I ask Cory.

“You just keep your end of the bargain, missy, and leave the B and E to me.”

“B and E?”

“For a genius, you’re kind of dumb,” he says, then leans toward me and whispers in my ear, “but still cute.”

My head and stomach plow together and I feel like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer on that holiday cartoon when the girl reindeer calls him cute and he flies for the first time, red glowing nose and all. My hands are sweaty. I’m smiling inside my chest, and I stay like that all the way to the edge of town, where we park the car on a side street in Northwest Portland close to the streetcar and make a dash for my old neighborhood.

We slip onto the bright orange streetcar along with moms and dads and strollers and grandparents and teenagers from the burbs, sporting Beaverton and Gresham hoodies, carrying blankets and folding chairs and cartons of sidewalk chalk and Styrofoam coolers and umbrellas because the forecast called for a seventy percent chance of rain, like it always does on Darknights Parade night.