Elfriede rises from the divan. Her heart is so full of—of something, some airy substance—she almost levitates. “Never knows he’s fathered a child? His poor child never to know his own father? His own brother?”

“Frau von Kleist!”

She picks up Nurse’s horrified hands. “We are all sinners, Nurse. We are none of us blameless in this mortal life. Why should we pile evil upon evil? You must stay here, of course. You must let us take care of you. If Gerhard has fathered a child, he must of course be a father to his child. It’s immoral to do otherwise.”

“But I can’t! Stay under this roof! It’s not—it’s not decent!”

“You will please let me judge the decency of the affair. I am, after all, the wronged party.” Elfriede smiles as she says this. Wronged party. Like a court of law, like the words on some document, impervious to the queer vagaries of the human heart, the unexpected levitations to which it’s subject. Wronged party. She thinks of Gerhard banging away atop Nurse in the summer twilight, roaring out his ecstasy as he spent. Did they do it in the baron’s bedroom? Some other chamber? By day or by night? Surely not Nurse’s bedroom, which she shares with Johann’s little cot. Well, wherever it was, whenever it was. Her heart aches for Gerhard’s guilt, the suffering he must have felt after the pleasures of copulation died away. Wronged party. If only she could laugh right now, if only she could laugh out loud and not have poor Nurse stare at her like you stared at a madwoman.

Lulu

December 1941

(The Bahamas)

The way I heard the story is this. When he first came to Nassau, at the invitation of none other than Harold Christie, who could smell money on a man the same way sharks smelled blood in the water, Harry Oakes (he had not yet been awarded his baronetcy by a grateful Empire) walked into the British Colonial Hotel in his rough clothes and his rough accent and got the rough treatment from the management. So he bought the place. End of story.

Probably the real history isn’t so simple as that, but human beings love nothing so much as a tale that confirms their particular prejudices, so I’ll let it stand. And the ending’s the same, either way. Harry Oakes bought the British Colonial, that much is indisputable, and in December of 1941 his daughter Nancy came out into society inside the walls of its ballroom. Oh, it was a swell party, believe me. I was there.