The Empress Chronicles (8 page)

Mummi extracted a hatpin from the dressing table and pierced the glue, gliding the pin along the seam of the envelope. It made a stiff ripping sound. She pulled out the letter and read it aloud in one long gallop:

Dearest Elisabeth (Sisi),

I sincerely hope you do not find this note too forward. Ever since the summer Tegernsee holiday, I have thought of your vibrant grace each day. Please accept a gift of chocolate and a pretty little timepiece locket that has been in the Habsburg family for many a year. You will see that there is a wing built into its design (aged copper, which so reminded me of you and your green eyes), and I do pray that you will not be offended if I place my likeness opposite the time. As you are a lover of words (or so I have heard), you will indeed understand the metaphor: wings, time, myself. The gift should arrive by coach before the week is out.

Until another day.

Yours,

Karl Ludwig

Mummi folded the paper and tucked it back into the envelope. “Ah,” she said. “It’s the younger archduke. Little Karl. I was not aware you’d even had a conversation with him.
Green
eyes, however? Not very observant.”

Karl who?
I had had no conversation with the young archduke, but when I searched my memory of the horrid visit, I’d seen, on the grounds, a boy clad in the military uniform befitting an Austrian royal. His skin, I recalled, was a mass of bumps and rash. “That boy with the pustule face? The archduchess’s younger son? He wrote to me? But why?”

Mummi sighed. “Evidently, my dear, he was quite bewitched by you. Charming. But certainly nothing to take seriously. He’s still so young. Has yet to do his time in the military. I wonder if my sister knows of this note?”

The note gave me pause. If the younger brother had been so bold as to write me, what of the future emperor? This, of course, was more important. “Has Nené heard from Archduke Franz Joseph?”

Mummi shook her head. “And it worries me. Between us, I hoped that he would have written of his intentions by now. But with the Revolution and all …”

“Karl,” I whispered to myself. Karl.
Karl. Karl.
In the journal in my head, I was already building verse:

I hasten to the realm of dreams, my Karl, there are you,
My soul, my heart, they jubilate, for you and only you.

I would amend the second
you
, certainly, once I was alone with my journal. Or possibly the first
you
would change. At any rate, Karl was destined (Oh, how I loved that word,
destined
) to be my first love, the first man to court me. And why not? Now that I was forbidden fun, freedom and fresh air, Karl would be the substitute. Certainly, his face was difficult to look upon, but, now that I was lady, such shallow thoughts must banish themselves. What was most important was the possibility of love. As if by some spell, suddenly, I could not wait until his gift arrived. My very first gift from a suitor! Beneath the corset-squeezing pains, the blood of this wretched affliction called womanhood, I would find a way to escape after all. As always.

There was plenty of opportunity to write, rewrite, and write some more with regard to my new obsession, the young archduke. Sitting on my throne of cloth while the three days of stillness leaked away, I composed my journal entries, sketched my daydreams and, more to the point, wrote Karl Ludwig a return note.

His gift of alpine chocolates arrived, though the under-governess and the scullery maid had pinched them “to ensure their safety,” they’d said, but I knew they couldn’t resist the sweets. Shortly thereafter, Gackl came bounding through the nursery with a wrapped box for me. Certainly my little brother was hoping for a ball or a rope or maybe even a set of building blocks. After unknotting the silk ribbon and ripping the rice paper, Gackl’s face deflated like a pin-stuck balloon. Instead of something that would appeal to a child, there lay tarnished copper feathers, which jutted from a rose-painted locket timepiece, all of which hung from a modest silver chain. “Your admirer sent you a pocket watch?”

It was lovely, with a snap hinge revealing the time on the front and a small photo of Karl, dressed in uniform, on the inside. I now wore it around my neck day and night, winding it every morning, happily hearing the tick, tick, and imagining that far off in Vienna, Karl’s heart made that same sound. In his photograph, I saw the man he would soon grow into. Perhaps he was still a boy, but barely a boy. I could love him. Certainly I could.

Dear Karl
, I began. And then crumpled the paper. Again:
Dearest Karl
. No. Another try:
My darling Karl. Karl, my dearest.
That one I ripped to shreds.

Gackl was happily frolicking with his new assortment of friends, the four dark brown Nubian boys.
New brothers
, Papa had ventured. Mummi was none too happy with this addition, and the under-governesses were fit to be tied.

Baroness would not even participate. “This is not to be tolerated,” she’d let Mummi’s lady-in-waiting know, and Mummi had agreed.

“I can only beg your forgiveness, Wilhelmine, for the duke has, once again, seen fit to add myriad complexities to all of our lives.”

Karl
, I wrote, leaving a space in front of his name.
Imagine the joy in my heart upon receiving your missive
. Crumple.

Meanwhile, Nené was preparing for our first autumn ball of the season. If a cotillion lay in her future, she must, according to the dance master, practice. Practice, practice, practice.

Life in Munich was quite busy, and even from my sequester, I watched out the window as carriages came and went. Papa had agreed that while the turmoil surrounded Uncle Ludwig’s palace, we would house some paintings in our halls, and four large men hauled in an enormous picture, one replete with angels and battles and swords and blood. There was the Messiah in the very middle of this painting, about to stab Himself with a dagger, and in the very corner, a suspicious character fleeing the scene. I had heard from the maids that the villain in the painting was a Jew, and it was best that while the revolutionaries marched on Uncle’s castle, we be the keepers of that one.

In all the mayhem, most pronounced was a renewed battle between my parents. Papa’s screams at Mummi echoed off our castle walls. “You were born an old lady, Ludovica.”

And Mummi: “You have made me that way, Duke.” She did not approve of the parties day and night in Papa’s beer hall. The peasant girls he danced with. The trick riding in the newly converted circus. “And if you get trampled in a drunken heap under your horse, what then?” she wanted to know.

Karl, my dearest apple
, I wrote.
My pumpkin
.
My strudel.

The odd turns of the heart were a curiosity, but in my newfound state of smitten, I vowed that my own heart would never grow cold. Once I loved, I promised, I would never unlove. As if in agreement, the locket-watch ticked against my breast.

Against the far wall of the nursery, Gackl was playing cards with the blackamoors. “A king beats a queen,” he said. “And there, that’s a one-eyed jack. If you see it first, you pound it with your fist, then take it.”

The boys nodded solemnly, periodically twisting their heads round to look over their shoulders. They did not sit cross-legged on the floor like my brother; they crouched on their haunches.

Beside me lay the heavy French history books Baroness Wilhelmine had deposited earlier. Thank goodness my bleeding time gave me a reprieve from the lesson desk. Next to the books were compresses and a vessel of herbs and boiled water to soothe my cramping. The books made a perfect lap desk for me, upon which I wrote:
To Karl the handsome
, and then,
To Karl my cousin
, and then,
Your Grace
,
Your Most Eminent,
My friend
. Crumple, crumple. There were now no less than a dozen papers, all twisted into balls, scattered about the floor. Ink stained my fingers. I made thumbprints on the paper. Lip prints, too. Practice, Nené’s dance master had said. Well, one day I would kiss this archduke; I was sure of it, so why not practice that as well?

I had indeed witnessed Papa kissing someone other than Mummi. Once, at Possi, he’d left the dancing during a party, and I went to search for him. He’d promised we could play music together, and I had my tambourine ready. I wandered through the parlor, the library, the music room—no Papa. Finally, in the breakfast pantry, there he was, on the baker’s table, on top of one of the neighbor girls. The one who brought the milk to our house in the early morning.

When I returned home I conveyed the occasion to Baroness Wilhelmine, and she told me, “Your father cannot help his charms, Elisabeth. It is up to the women to refuse him.”

I thought this over and asked, “Then a lady might initiate such a thing?”

She replied, “Only a tart or a queen may do so.”

I had not yet decided which one to become, but I figured one couldn’t practice too much. And one also needed inspiration. Gackl and his latest retinue might prove just the ticket. I set my things aside and rose from my enforced paralysis. The discarded attempts at communication with my beloved clotted my path, so I kicked them out of my way. “Gackl,” I said, “deal me in.”

“But Sisi, you’re not to play with us,” my brother argued, citing Baroness Wilhelmine, her last words before retiring with one of her autointoxication episodes.

“Nonsense,” I scolded, kicking against Gackl’s small behind with my toe. I reached down and thwacked his suspender for good measure. I squatted in between two of the older boys, and they parted to make room. I eased myself down on the lump of blood-catching cloth affixed to my underthings. “We’re going to vary the game,” I said. “Whoever gets the queen of hearts must kiss me full on the lips.”

The blackamoors had no idea what I was saying and remained in their postures, imitating Gackl as he covered first his mouth and then his ears.

“For goodness sakes,” I said, grabbing the deck, slapping down card after card until there she was, regal, elegant and red, even though she was now smudged with my inky prints. I turned to the boy next to me, placed my hands upon his shoulders, and set my lips against his.
Karl,
I thought.
Karl
.
Karl.
My lips tasted of salt when I pulled them off the boy. He rubbed his hand over his mouth and spit on the nursery floor.

My brother leapt to his feet. “Sisi, are you mad?”

The red queen stared back at me from atop the deck of cards. If she could speak, she would have scolded. Perhaps I was mad? Perhaps love made one mad? The boys huddled together, cringing as they watched Gackl pull me away from their game.

Clearly, I still existed in a middle space. Not a child. Not a lady. I felt a new feeling, like a heavy weight, pulling from inside of me, and a powerful sorrow like a swollen stream ready to burst its banks. Shame. Regret. Confusion. If this was the path of my future, I wanted none of it.

In the morning, the three of us file into the sedan, which is the least broken down of all the Volvos. We have a full day in town planned. My appointment with Dr. Greta, lunch at Spice—one of my favorite Pearl restaurants—and following that, we’re going to pick up Cory from the train station.

I’ve managed to hide the deep scratches I made in my skin; they ache and burn under my flannel shirt and jeans. Freshly dosed on my anti-OCD cocktail, I feel heavy, thick. I hold the ingestion log tight against my chest. My iPod buds are crammed firmly into my ears.

The agony of the day before lingered in me like the last marks of pencil that you can’t erase, but a good night’s sleep helped. As soon as my eyes fluttered open, I made resolutions. I would improve, engage, be better in every way over this next six months. I resolved to toe the line with the cognitive behavioral therapy. I would try—no, embrace—Dr. Greta’s desensitization exercises. In the backseat of the Volvo I listen to the Württemberg Chamber Orchestra, while in front Dad and Willow chat about goat and chicken supplies. Through the concerto, even over the puttering car engine, I can hear their words ever so faintly.

Willow: Let’s pick up some of that dandelion cleanse formula.

Dad: That stuff gives me the runs.

Willow: That’s the point.

Dad: No, thanks.

This is just like at Providence, where the girls went on at length about their colonic regimes. Only for some reason, toxic cleanses in the world of adults weren’t deemed nutso. I lick my dry lips. Try not to picture my father’s bowel movements. We are almost at Tenth and Taylor. I check my cell phone. Nothing. No texts from Mom. No voicemails.

“You can let me off here,” I call to the front seat as they began the next topic, Vietnamese gluten.

The car sputters to the curb and I hop out, my food diary in hand, Bach’s Concerto No. 3 in G Major at the part where the violins lift you off the ground. I fly the two blocks to Dr. Greta’s office building, where lion statues grace either side of a staircase, holding up paws, their claws separated with grime. I take the stairs two at a time and use the cuff of my sleeve to open the door by its long, brass handle. Inside the lobby, surfaces are cold and hard and gleaming—the air, turpentinish, like the studio where Mom and I once took an oil painting class together, but in this building nobody is making art. Everything about the place points to old, old, old, old, except that the elevator is surprisingly fast. It shocks me every time that before I can count to seven, I’m on the fourth floor, the tinny ding of a bell sounds, and then the doors yawn to reveal gummy carpet, tobacco walls and, occasionally, the whir of a dentist’s drill.

Dr. Greta’s door is at the end of a long hall, and the sign on the outside reads simply HELLO in bright red block letters. In my darker, meaner moments, I want to pry the “O” off.

Inside is a small room with four bright green vinyl chairs, and a low, square table piled with issues of
Good Housekeeping
,
Highlights for Children
, and
Scientific American
. There’s another table, a small one in a corner, where waiting patients can choose a bag of herbal tea and fill a paper cup with hot water from a plugged-in carafe. A divot in the carpet remains where there used to be an aquarium.

Dr. Greta’s actual office is on the other side of a deep plum-colored door next to the former aquarium. If the door is open a crack, that’s the signal to come right in. If it’s closed, as it is this particular day, I sit on a chair until summoned. I open a magazine with a tear in the front cover. Somebody, at some point, needed to get rid of gum.

The cover shot of the magazine is a woman who had a bunch of kids. Multiples. And there she is, a toddler under each arm like twin footballs, baring her tummy, a silver hoop in her navel even. A bright pink headline screams
Sexy isn’t just for singles anymore!
The show-off mommy has been airbrushed, I’m sure, but she looks not much older than me. I thwack the magazine back on the table, and on cue, the door to Dr. Greta creaks open.

“Lizbeth,” she says. “Enter.”

I do as she commands and sit down in my usual wingback chair, facing her and her curio cabinet of messily stacked books. She’s dressed in her usual uniform of Birkenstocks and rolled-up canvas pants. Since my last visit, she’s trimmed and blow-dried her white hair; the pageboy cut barely covers the tops of her ears.

“So?” she begins, her voice a sound like cutting through stiff brown bread with a nail file. I take the buds out of my ears. Press the pause button on my iPod. “You survived the first week at the farm, yes?”

“Yes.”

“You’ve spent some time with your father’s lady friend, then?”

“I have.”

“And have you heard from your mother?”

I instinctively move my hand to the little rectangle of a phone in my pocket. “Nope. Not a word. But you know, she’s in the middle of the ocean.”

“True,” she says, eyeing the book in my lap. “I see you brought the ingestion log?”

“Yes.”

“Good. May I see?”

“I, uh, didn’t record food in it …” I start.

Dr. Greta is poker-faced, but her hands twitch her disappointment. I lick my lips. My eyes wander to the cabinet of ancient books. “But you did write
something
there?”

The ancient books in the cabinet, a couple of them have gold lettering on their spines. German. “German,” I say.

“Pardon?” she says.

“That empress you told me about? The German one? With the eating disorder?”

“Empress Elisabeth?” Dr. Greta asks.

“Was she, um, cured?”

Dr. Greta straightens in her chair. “Cured?” she says. “No. She coped, but she was not cured. You see, those were different times.”

“Yes, but,” I say, my throat drying up around the words that were trying to push out, “did it kill her? The disorder?”

Dr. Greta’s face opens up like an accordion folder, the way a face does when peeking into a blanketed bundle of a new baby: wonder, amazement, fear. I am engaging, and she likes this, but maybe she is also sort of scared of it. “Sisi has a long, complicated story, I’m afraid.”

“Sisi had a sister,” I say. “I looked it up. A beautiful sister?”

“Nené. Yes. Sisi and Nené were very different,” Dr. Greta continues. “This interests you, yes?”

The words
Count Sebastian must die
sit in my lap beneath the fancy etched cover.
Should I ask her?
I look toward the little diary in the cabinet. “In that journal, did she say anything about death? I have this book from school about her called
Death by Fame
.”

“Ah,” she says. “The Sinclair book. I know it. He focused on her assassination in Geneva and how her celebrity led to her death. I don’t buy it really. She was simply a victim of a crazy man.”

A
crazy
man? Should a therapist use that word? My scratched-up hands and arms pulse and sting. There’s no sun streaming in the window behind Dr. Greta. Her smooth hair bothers me.

“Lizbeth, what you need to know now is that we are the makers of our own destiny. You can choose to be swallowed up by circumstance, or you can choose to take that great brain of yours, that deep sensitivity, and work your way through this difficult time. I deeply believe that you, Liz, have something very special to offer. But first, you need to eat. Yes?”

My nose begins to itch, then my scalp. My shins. Thoughts are coming fast and furious. I try to hold them in. Where is my music? Schubert’s adagio in E Flat, with its piano and violin softly arguing and then making up, would help right now, but I’d made my iPod mute. A weird battle starts between my head and my mouth and before I can stop them, they explode out of me, words, words, words: “I hate it there. It’s exactly as I expected. It sucks. It’s dirty. And Willow—that’s her name, Willow—is a terrible housekeeper and she drinks tea and she’s a stupid gluten-free nut, and now she’s invited her brother—”

I went further than I intended. Dr. Greta practically levitated off of her chair. I can almost see lightning bolts from my mouth to her ears.

“Her
brother
?”

“Yeah, Coriander. Cory, they call him. He’s some sort of delinquent.”

Dr. Greta nods, which is what she does when another type of therapist would be writing a note. Today, like many days, her notebook stays closed.

“I think maybe my medication should be switched or upped or something.”

Dr. Greta does a quick full-body glance. “How is your appetite?”

“They’re spraying poison on the field today? So probably I won’t be eating for, like, a week. It’s unappetizing, all those toxins.”

“Have you written anything in the log?”

Count Sebastian must die.

I shake my head.

“Let me see your hands,” she barks then, employing her seldom-used Nazi-doctor voice.

I thrust them toward her, scratched and raw, and she rises, taking them in her hands and rubbing her thumb all over the knuckles. She sighs out loud. Which is weird, her showing emotion.

I feel my lungs close down. It’s hard to breathe. I want to ask about the writing in the diary, but instead all that comes out is, “Why do you have those stupid magazines in your waiting room?” I gulp air. “Isn’t it a little hypocritical? Body image-wise, I mean?”

She sighs once more. “Lizbeth, we need to focus on
you
.
Your
health.
Your
progress.
Your
accountability. I’m quite sure you’ve lost more weight. And you’ve been washing the hands more frequently.”

“I had an accident,” I tell her. “She made me do something with a needle and I stabbed myself.”

We sit in silence. Dr. Greta tries to keep her face neutral, but I can tell she’s gritting her teeth. Clenching her jaw. I wash my hands with the air, rubbing them together over an invisible bar of soap. The only sound is the ticking clock. But then, on the street below, a siren starts up with a high-pitched
whoo-whoo-whoop!

All at once, out her mouth rush other words. Words I hadn’t expected at all: “Next month, I will be retiring.”

This is a day of surprises. I should be happy, really, but my stomach does that weird thing it did when I noticed the missing aquarium.

“I won’t pretend that I’m not sad, Lizbeth, to see this backward step from you. I had really hoped we were making progress, you and I. I’ll be referring you on, of course, but we must improve this month. Or …”

She winces. Not sure what to say. I hate that she thinks I’ve gone backward. We sit facing each other for another couple of minutes, and then she uncrosses her legs and stands. She paces back and forth in front of me. I watch her the way I used to watch the metronome above my piano, back in our old house, back when there was money for lessons.

I feel my forehead wrinkle.

“Get up, please,” she whispers, and she reaches into the pocket of her therapist pants and pulls out her tiny key.

I stand.

She fits the little key into a lock in her curio cabinet. She opens the glass door. “The Empress Sisi diary. Take it.”

I don’t move.

Dr. Greta says, “Lift it off the shelf, Lizbeth.”

Really
?

I walk over to the cabinet. I pull a Kleenex from the pocket of my jeans and pry the little booklet off the shelf. The cover is stiff and old and smelly. Once it may have been a deep red, but now it’s the color of a stain—some combination of black and brown and gray.

“It won’t bite,” says Dr. Greta, eyeing the tentative way I hold the fragile little book.

“Is this really her diary?” I ask.

“Open it up.”

I hear the door out in the waiting room open and close. The next victim. Our time is nearly over. I lift the delicate front cover, and underneath is yellowed paper smeared with black ink, written in foreign cursive. “I can’t read German.”

“She was quite fond of drawing: another thing you and she have in common. You’ll enjoy, perhaps, her whimsical sketches?”

The book smells of mouse droppings. “You want me to take this home? Isn’t it, like, valuable?”

Dr. Greta shakes her head. “No, the book stays here. But look through it now, and we can discuss her childhood next week. There are more things I can tell you about this girl. Useful things to you, I believe.” Then, crashing sounds from the waiting room, and Dr. Greta tries her best not to look alarmed. “I’ll be back in a minute, Lizbeth.”

Once she leaves the room, I turn the stiff pages. So yellow and fragile, they remind me of an antique doll I used to have, its lacey pinafore and bleached-out painted face. The doll was tossed when we moved. Along with the sum total of my childhood. Boxes and boxes taken to Goodwill. The piano, sold on Craigslist.

Sisi’s small book feels inconsequential, miniature. Like the ribcage of a sparrow. It seems crushable and breakable. One page has a funny sketch—a horse with a lady’s bonnet on its head. Squiggles coming from its backside, the way someone would show farting.
Really?
Someone famous and royal would draw this?

There are sections of verse, too. Poems in German.

Ich bin
I recognize as
I am
.
Krone
is
crown
. Maybe Sisi also wrote sarcastic limericks about people she didn’t like. I page further. There’s a sketch of a short black child swinging from a trapeze.
Mohr
written beside it. And
Kuss
. I turn the page but too quickly, and some pages rip off in my hand. Clumsy me. Showing, once again, my utter lack of grace and poise. I hear murmuring outside, Dr. Greta’s voice coming closer. I grab my diary and shove the ancient pages inside of it.