Dinner is brown bread, margarine, pea soup with tiny pieces of ham, washed down with weak tea. I ask her about Thorpe as a boy, about summers in Germany, about this grandmother of theirs, but she doesn’t want to answer me. Instead she asks me about my own childhood, about America, about my parents, and she listens earnestly to my replies. “How queer,” she says, over and over, as if America is something exotic, as if my father and mother are a species of animal you find in a zoo.

We wash the dishes. She shows me to the lavatory and finds me a toothbrush. She shows me to my room—Thorpe’s room—and only at the last second, as we exchange awkward good nights at the door, do I summon the resolve to press her again about her past.

“Do you miss it? Germany, I mean. Could you ever go back?”

“Go to Germany? Are you mad?”

I shrug one shoulder, like a question. Margaret bends down and lifts Tuxedo from the floor, where he’s been winding around my legs, making suggestive noises. She strokes the fur between his ears. When she speaks, she addresses herself to the cat, not to me.

“I’m afraid there are certain places to which you can never return.”

Elfriede

October 1900

(Germany)

On the canopied bed where Gerhard von Kleist consummated his marriage by the light of two dozen beeswax candles—Schloss Kleist was not then electrified—he now lies in darkness, attended by a doctor brought in from hated Berlin, a Jew, the foremost expert in infectious disease, who once raised the Kaiser’s own son almost from the dead.

Gerhard has typhoid. It’s not hopeless, everyone insists, as they go about the corridors in dark clothes, mute voices, furrowed brows. Not hopeless at all. He’s such a strong, big fellow. How could a puny germ conquer Baron von Kleist?

Elfriede knows how. It’s five o’clock in the morning and she sits by the bed, reading aloud from Faust—naturally, Gerhard worships Goethe—but she doesn’t hear her own words. Inside her head, she’s begging God to let her husband live, not to punish Gerhard because Elfriede has fallen in love with another man and committed adultery in her heart. That last conversation with Wilfred, she hears every word echoing against her skull: If something were to happen to my husband. And: It would be like wishing he were dead. Almost as if she knew, as if she obtained some subconscious knowledge of what was happening in Westphalia while she sat on her mountaintop with her lover, speaking of Gerhard in the past tense. He loved me so much.