Nothing That Meets the Eye (38 page)

Lotte and her husband stayed for several weeks with some English friends in Kent. Esther saw them a few times in London during the first of their stay, but when they left, Lotte merely called her to say good-bye. Lotte Kiefer, like most of Esther's family, was on the stuffy side and considered Esther rather bohemian. Esther had no doubt that Lotte had heard, while she was in England, of her liaison with Richard Friedmann. Lotte must have remembered him from Munich, because Richard said he remembered her. It crossed Esther's mind that Lotte had been cool to her because Richard was half Jewish, though she could not really believe that her family, proud of its blood though it was, could have been taken in by the vulgar Nazi propaganda. Nevertheless, Esther felt she had been slighted, but she accepted the slight as she had accepted her poverty, the war, Richard, and her graying hair and coarsening figure, with a shrug and a smile.

Then came the morning when Richard received the letter asking him to resume his old position with Beckhof Verlag in Munich. And at a salary Esther knew would go far in Germany now, four thousand marks per month. “Oh, Richard! Wie wunderschön! You'll go, of course, won't you?” Esther asked. Richard's small hazel eyes had suddenly brightened. “Yes. I suppose I will.” They both had had to start off for their respective jobs a few moments later, and there had been no time to talk or to ask questions, except Esther's “When do you want to go?” and Richard's answer, “Oh, as soon as possible.”

Esther wondered if Richard would happily go off without her. She could not very well go to Munich with him, or just turn up as if by accident in a few weeks, not with all the people they both knew in Munich. The question was settled that night almost as soon as Richard came in the door. He said, “Esther, will you marry me now?” Esther said, “Of course.” She reached up and put her arms around his thin neck, and kissed him tenderly. There were tears of pleasure and surprise in her eyes, and for a few minutes she could say nothing. Richard said, “I told you, Esther, it was the money that prevented. Now that's not a problem anymore.”

Esther and Richard were married quietly, and they gave a wedding supper for about ten of their friends at a restaurant in the King's Road. Esther almost broke down at the thought of leaving all the people who had been such loyal friends to her and Richard—the Campbells, Tom Bradley and his girl Edna, and the Jordans. Esther got promises from Tom Bradley and Edna and from the Campbells that they would try to come to Munich before Christmas. “You can stay with us, so don't worry about the travel allowance. I know we'll have a place big enough,” Esther said.

As they were leaving the restaurant, John Campbell patted Richard on the back and said, “I've been wanting to do this for a long time.”

“What?” asked Richard.

“Look behind you!” Esther said, laughing.

Pinned to his back was a cardboard sign saying: “We finally tied it!”

They had very little baggage, so they flew. Esther sat up close to the window during the short low hops over France and western Germany, but Richard read material that Beckhof's had forwarded to him, and showed a total disinterest in what the face of Europe looked like. It rather exasperated Esther, though she said nothing. She had the feeling he was putting on an act for somebody, pretending to have made the trip dozens of times, and to know all there was to know. He behaved the same way in Munich. All he wanted to do was to get settled and to begin work as soon as he could.

Twice during the first week, Esther went with Richard to dinner parties where she met the Beckhof editors and their representatives from Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, and Berlin. It thrilled Esther to see Richard treated as a man of importance now. Esther got on well with everyone at the parties. She had always gotten on well with writers and intellectuals. Adjusting to life in Germany would be very easy after all, she thought, here in Munich where people either didn't know or didn't care that she and Richard had just been married, and if there were any anti-Jewish sentiment anywhere, it would not exist among the kind of people she and Richard came in contact with.

They had hardly moved into the Bogenhausen house when Richard said he wanted to have some people over. “Not just business people. Some of our own old friends, too,” he said gaily.

“All right,” Esther agreed. But she didn't know who their old friends could be, because she and Richard had known almost no one in common in Munich. It turned out that Richard meant he would invite some of his old friends, and she some of hers.

The day before the party, Lotte Kiefer called up. She had heard the good news, she said, through Leopold Beckhof himself, whom she knew. She congratulated them on their marriage, and sounded so warm and friendly that Esther invited her and her husband to come to the party. “It's just some old friends of Richard's and mine whom we haven't seen in ages—a little reunion.” Esther felt suddenly happy and optimistic about the party. She might have been mistaken about Lotte's coolness in London, she thought. She hoped so.

Everyone they had invited came. The big living room was completely filled, and she and Richard took turns showing people over the house. Lotte Kiefer asked all about Richard's work, and said she and Richard must come for dinner at their apartment in Schwabing. “It's a little on the arty side, compared to this,” Lotte said apologetically, “but it overlooks the Englischer Garten and I think it has charm.” Esther beamed with gratitude and said she and Richard would be delighted to come. It was not until after the buffet supper had been served, when people were sitting about with coffee and cigarettes—English cigarettes that Richard had thoughtfully brought over with him, because German cigarettes were still so bad—that Esther realized how shabbily Lotte was dressed. There was a worn streak in the brown fox piece around her neck, and cracks in her black alligator shoes, the kind of cracks that only slow time can put in good leather, for the shoes had obviously been expensive. And the poverty showed not only in her clothes but in her pinched face as well. Esther stared at her like a person who cannot believe his eyes, because Esther had been brought up to believe that Lotte's branch of the family had much more money than her own. They had simply lost it, of course, since the war. Lotte was really just as shabby now as old Professor Haggenbach in his shiny black suit, or the dowdy woman called Frieda whom Richard had been talking to most of the evening.

Lotte said, “It's just like slipping back into an old glove for Richard, I suppose, isn't it? He has his old secretary back, too.”

“Who?” Esther asked.

“Why, Frieda Meyer. Didn't he ever—” She stopped, and Esther looked at her. Lotte was smiling a little. “That's Frieda he's talking to now,” she said. Her name had not registered with Esther, she had met so many new people tonight. She did not think Richard had ever mentioned her.

Later that evening, when she and Richard were alone in their bedroom, Esther told Richard her surprise about Lotte Kiefer's apparent lack of money. “It doesn't surprise me,” Richard said. “Now it's the commercial upstarts who've got the money. The old aristocracy and even most of the old solid merchants like the Kiefers are down and out.” He said it in such a loud, matter-of-fact voice, Esther was a little shocked. Moreover, the Kiefers were not merely old solid merchants, but a very good family.

“Why didn't you tell me that Fräulein Meyer was your old secretary? I didn't have any idea who she was,” Esther said.

“Oh. Yes, Frieda worked for me before the war. I understand she's worked for Leopold off and on all during the war years.”

In the next weeks, Esther thought a great deal about the financial reversals of people like Lotte Kiefer, not so much because it interested her as an economic phenomenon but because she began to see that the people who had had money before and had little now were making an effort to cultivate her and Richard for what they could get out of them. Lotte Esther minded least; she was merely hungry for invitations and for the aesthetic pleasure of a well-served dinner, because she had evidently been more or less dropped by her wealthier friends. Professor Haggenbach, retired and living on an inadequate pension, was interested in getting Beckhof to support him while he finished a book on philosophy. As to the Krügers, who were exactly the commercial upstart type Richard had spoken of, Esther could not bear them. Hermann Krüger had recently made his money from a new weaving method which he had sold to an Augsburg stocking factory. She and Richard had nothing in common with the Krügers, and it was obvious that the Krügers were interested in them for purely social-climbing purposes, because other people in comparable income brackets had not yet admitted the Krügers into their circle.

“It's not that I particularly dislike them,” Esther said to Richard, “but what can we ever talk to them about except soccer and Strümpfen? There're so many nice people in Munich, I don't see why we have to get mixed up with these.”

Richard said with a little smile, “I don't see what's the matter with them. You aren't getting snobbish, are you, Esther?”

So they accepted the Krügers' invitation to tea on Saturday. It was a dreary, almost terrifying imitation of the old Munich Konzert afternoons that Esther remembered from her early twenties, when she had at least been able to amuse herself by flirting with handsome young men during the arias of the hired female singer. The other guests, without exception, were people like the Krügers, who could talk of nothing but textile manufacture and sport. But Richard chatted with everyone, and he told Esther he had had a very good time. Perhaps it was inevitable, Esther thought, that Richard did not judge such gatherings in the same way she did. He had a curiously impersonal attitude to people, and even, she admitted, to herself. And he was working so hard that any kind of social life was probably an agreeable relief. He had worked in his office all day that Saturday until time for the tea party, and that same evening he had to go out again to dinner with Leopold Beckhof and a man from Paris.

That evening, Leopold Beckhof telephoned and asked to talk to Richard. Esther said Richard had gone to meet him. Herr Beckhof said they had no appointment that he knew of, but he wanted to give Richard some instructions about a manuscript he was reading that weekend. He asked her to tell Richard to call him tomorrow morning. Esther felt curiously shaken when she hung up. She had suddenly remembered Lotte telling her several days ago that she had seen Richard and Frieda Meyer one evening about ten o'clock, having coffee together at the Rathskeller Restaurant. Esther had thought very little of it, had thought perhaps Richard had invited her for coffee after one of the late sessions with Leopold at the office. But she remembered Lotte's amused smile when she had told her. Now Esther had a vision of Richard sitting opposite Frieda Meyer in some restaurant, having dinner. Could it be possible? That dowdy, colorless woman? She even wore horn-rimmed glasses. And hardly any lipstick. Esther evoked in her memory Frieda Meyer's thick body sitting on the hassock in front of the fireplace, and tried to divine what Richard might possibly be attracted to. She lifted the telephone again, with the idea of calling Lotte and asking her outright if she suspected that anything was going on between Richard and Frieda, then put it down, thinking that the next time she saw Lotte would be more fitting, more dignified. Then this struck her as absurd, and she picked up the telephone and dialed Lotte's number. “I called to ask you . . . a rather personal question, Lotte. You don't have to answer it if you don't want to.” But she heard Lotte's sudden curiosity, and she was sure Lotte would be delighted to answer.

“Well, Esther—I thought you knew,” Lotte replied. “You must be the only person in Munich who doesn't. Richard and Frieda had an affair that lasted for years before the war. Of course, when I told you I saw her with Richard in the Rathskeller, I didn't mean to imply that I thought anything now. I mean, naturally I don't think Richard would do a thing like that now that he's married.”