The American Lady (4 page)

3

Just a few steps from where New York made—and lost—its money was the Brooklyn Bar. The clientele was mostly bankers and brokers in their shirtsleeves. Sometimes one of them would invite his secretary to join him, but there were generally few female customers. The bar’s owner, Mickey Johnson, set great store by the fact. “Where can a man have a few drinks in peace and quiet these days? There’s nowhere safe from women, I’m tellin’ ya!” he often lamented. If he saw a woman come through the doors he usually gave her a frosty welcome indeed.

Whether they’d made money that day or lost it, in the evening the customers crowded about Mickey’s counter in such numbers that the beer pumps never rested for a moment. Full glasses were simply passed back through the crowd as the barmaid could never have kept up on her own. And whether it had been a good day or bad, Mickey’s bar was always astonishingly loud. Huge quantities of alcohol were consumed and the tobacco smoke was thicker than the morning mist on the Hudson River. A chance passerby, who was drawn in by the crowds and chose to drop in for a beer, would never have been able to guess what kind of day it had been on the New York Stock Exchange. Mickey himself boasted that he could tell just from the smell of the men’s sweat; good cheer and excitement smelled quite different from dogged determination, and different again from panic and fear.

Harold Stein had just taken his first sip of scotch when he saw Wanda come through the door. They had made it a habit to meet here every Wednesday after work, though most of the time he was there an hour before she was.

Her head held high, her eyes fixed dead ahead, she made her way through the press of wildly gesticulating men. The expression on her face was icier than an approaching storm, yet every man in the room looked at her in awe all the same—Mickey included. As soon as he spotted Wanda hurrying past his counter, he left the beer glasses unattended and reached up for the bottle of aniseed liqueur. He poured it into a tall, slim glass, which he handed to the nearest customer. “Pass it through! This one’s for the lady!” he barked, then watched keenly as the glass made its way through the crowd.

How does Wanda manage to win people over like that without having to do a thing?
Harold wondered, not for the first time. Charm alone was not enough, no more than beauty—though Wanda had plenty of both, to be sure. Was it her unmistakable laugh, so free and easy that everybody in the room turned their heads to look when they heard it? The enthusiasm she brought to everything she did, even the smallest daily task? Harold had never been quite able to say just what her gift was, but he knew that he sometimes envied it—especially when he had to deal with a difficult client. Wanda would probably have found it the easiest thing in the world to persuade that Oregon hog baron to invest in Silver International—but, despite his best efforts, he had to let the stubborn old goat leave without signing a thing.

Harold noticed the admiring looks the other men gave Wanda as she sat down across from him on the narrow bench. How they would have liked to touch her light-blonde hair! To inhale that smell of peaches and young skin! To put an arm around her slender, supple waist or run a finger along the smooth line of her neck. All of a sudden the air in Mickey’s bar, the haunt of hard-bitten profit hunters, tingled with quite another appetite.

Wanda’s drink had reached the table just before she did, and she picked it up and took a sip the moment she sat down. She wore a grim look on her face.

Harold noticed right away that she was not carrying that silly white apron over her arm. Hadn’t she come straight from work, though? It wasn’t hard to figure out what had happened. Well, he knew he wouldn’t hear that charming laugh today.

“What was it this time?” he asked. “Am I right to assume that you’re finished with Dittmer’s?”

Wanda frowned. “How did yo
u . . .
” But instead of finishing her question, she sighed. “It was Monique Desmoines’s pig trotters!”

“Her
what
?”

“I got the order wrong. Actually, no I didn’t. If Monique hadn’t made such a song and dance about her dinner party and—” Wanda waved her hand dismissively. “Then the way she reacted—it was ludicrous! All because of a little misunderstanding.”

She was putting on a brave face, but she couldn’t hide the fact that she had been deeply humiliated—the pain was visible in her eyes and her mouth was drawn tight.

Harold raised an eyebrow. The last job that Wanda had lost had been at Arts and Artists, a chic, modern gallery. As he recalled, she had been fired there because of a “misunderstanding” as well. She had only been on the job two weeks when she spotted a shabby-looking fellow packing sculptures away into his bag, and she had raised an alarm. Two cops who happened to be walking past the gallery just then had duly taken the man, loudly protesting, down to the station house. That had been the end for Wanda; the supposed thief turned out to be a well-known sculptor who had come to take some of his pieces back and put out new ones for sale, all with the gallery owner’s permission.

Wanda’s eyes were glittering, though Harold couldn’t tell whether this was because she was furious or fighting back tears.

“Oh, Harry, it’s so awful!” she snorted. “Mason Dittmer never even bothered to listen to my side of the story! I’ll tell you one thing; that’s the last they’ll ever see of me. I’d rather starve than buy so much as a slice of cake from there!” To lend force to her words, she drank down the liqueur in one gulp.

“Mixing up an order is hardly a reason to fire you,” Harold said, trying to downplay the whole episode. Then he looked at her skeptically. “What did you do, send ham instead of salami? But didn’t you say something about pig’s trotters?”

“Well, perhaps it wasn’t such a simple story after all,” Wanda said slowly. She looked down into her empty glass, absorbed by whatever she saw there. A moment later she giggled quietly, deep in her throat. Then she told Harold all about the huge fuss that Monique had made about keeping her secrets and about the sheet of notepaper that Wanda had passed on directly to the cooks. And she told him how they had duly prepared a platter of pig’s trotters, a dish of stewing steak, and a tureen of tripe soup. She also told him how she had decorated the casseroles and dishes herself so that nobody could spoil the surprise.

“I can’t believe it!” Harold said, leaning across the table to Wanda. “Tell me you’re pulling my leg! You must have noticed that something wasn’t quite right!”

She was taken aback. “Of course I thought it was odd!” she said defensively. “But after Monique had blathered on about the Fall of Man and culinary allegories, I thought that pig’s trotters sounded like just the thing. And apart from that, how was I supposed to know that the notepaper she gave me was her weekly order for the down-and-out shelter? I never even saw the menu for her party! It turns out the dishes were all supposed to be dyed black with squid ink.” She giggled nervously. “I would have loved to see the look on the guests’ faces.”

Harold couldn’t make himself laugh along. “You’re impossible! Why didn’t you go straight to Dittmer if you had the slightest doubt?”

“I never even thought of that,” she admitted and shrugged. “If you knew Monique and her crowd as well as I do, you wouldn’t even ask the question. There’s no end to their foolish ideas!”

He shook his head. On the one hand, Wanda liked to pretend that she couldn’t care less about being one of the upper class. On the other, she exploited her privilege shamelessly when it suited her. Rather than simply doing what was asked, she acted of her own accord, and never even thought about the consequences. This sort of behavior could be quite charming in a woman—but it was right out of place at Dittmer’s deli, or in any other job.

Wanda heaved a long sigh. “Oh, Harold, it’s so unfair! Why do these things always happen to me? I wanted nothing more than for it to work, this time.” She slumped in her seat. All her nonchalance had vanished and she looked young and vulnerable.

“Mason Dittmer can go to the devil! He’s a lout, and he doesn’t deserve you,” Harold heard himself say vehemently.
Why do I always let her wind me around her little finger like this?
he wondered, as he took Wanda’s hand and uttered soothing words.

They had met at the Spring Ball that his employer—the Stanley Finch Bank—threw for the company’s most important clients every year. Steven Miles had brought his family. When he saw how Wanda spoke to her parents, Harold had realized that she clearly did as she liked and got away with it, with no regard for the rules, thanks to her beauty and charm. He had resolved to be stricter with Wanda than everybody else was; if he wanted to make an impression on her, he had to play tough. It wasn’t an easy resolution to keep, however, for every time he looked at her lovely face he felt an urge to lay the world at her feet. But even he could do nothing to change the fact that this was the fourth job in a row she’d lost.

“Perhaps it just wasn’t meant to be,” he said. “Perhaps you’re not cut out for that sort of work.” He shook her arm gently. “Any one of your colleagues would have shown the order to Mr. Dittmer, but you went right ahead and did things on your own. As you always do. And that was your downfall. Not for the first time, I might add. Let me just remind you of Arts and Artists, and how yo
u—
”

“All right, all right. You don’t need to list my failures,” she cut in icily. “I hate it when you sound like my father.”

For Harold, this was almost a compliment. There were few men he admired as much as Steven Miles. He made no secret of his ambition to be just as rich and influential one day.

Ignoring Wanda’s sulky expression, he told her, “Your parents certainly won’t be angry if you give up the idea of working once and for all. And when we’re married, I’ll earn enough for both of us anyway. My darling—there are so many other ways a woman can keep busy! Especially a woman as charming and clever as you.” He nodded encouragingly.

She withdrew her hand. “I know you’d like it if I were like my mother and found one hundred and one ways to do nothing all day long. But I have to disappoint you there. I want to do something meaningful with my life,” she said loudly.

A few heads turned to look at them.

“Why shouldn’t I be able to do what thousands of seamstresses, chambermaids, and governesses do every day of their lives? Why shouldn’t I hold down a job? Am I not as clever as them, perhaps?”

“Nobody’s saying that. But why don’t you mention the real difference between yourself and these other women?”

“And what would that be?” she asked suspiciously.

Harold shrugged. “They
have
to work, but you don’t!”
They’ve never known any other life—
he could have added—
they’ve worked from morning till night ever since they were small
. But one look at her downcast face told him it was better not to say anything more.

“But I can’t spend all my time sitting about at home!”

“For my part, I really wouldn’t mind being a gentleman of leisure,” he answered with a grin. Once he saw her frown again, he hastily changed the topic. “By the way, am I mistaken or wasn’t your aunt supposed to be arriving from Germany today?”

“Six o’clock this evening. You’re mistaken, though, if you think I’m going to help with taking our small-town relative around New York. Mother can show her sister the city—I won’t be in any hurry to help, that’s for sure. From everything I hear about Aunt Marie, she’s a real oddball.” Wanda frowned. “What else could you call someone who’s never left her hometown in her life?”

Harold laughed. “I can see that you’ve already made up your mind about your German aunt.”

Wanda waved his remark away. “I won’t have time for her anyway; after all, I have to look for another job.”

She looked at her watch and put a hand to her mouth. “I’m already late! I was supposed to be at the hairdresser’s a quarter of an hour ago.” No sooner had she spoken than she was on her feet, stooping over to give Harold a good-bye kiss on the cheek.

“The hairdresser? Don’t they expect you to be home when your aunt arrives?” Harold asked, surprised.

Wanda made a face. “So what if they do? I’m sure some gossip has already told my mother about what happened at Dittmer’s—it could even have been Monique herself,” she remarked mockingly. “Since I’m sure to get a good scolding for that, a second one hardly matter
s . . .
” She shrugged. “Thank you for listening so patiently.”

And she was off.

4

“I still can’t believe you’re really here!” Ruth squeezed Marie’s arm as the two of them waited for the taxi driver to stow the luggage away behind the passenger bench.

“Nor can I,” Marie said, glancing around nervously at the harbor, her ship, the
Mauretania
, on its way to Ellis Island, the skyscrapers, which were so much taller from close u
p . . .
and the taxi, and Ruth. Above all Ruth. It was all so strange.

“You look wonderful,” Marie said spontaneously. She reached out almost reverently and stroked the silk sleeve of Ruth’s navy-blue suit.

At first she had hardly even recognized her sister. They had sent photographs to one another over the years, of course, but no picture in the world could have prepared her for Ruth’s elegance at thirty-eight years old. Her outfit was modest but of the finest quality—there was no longer any hint of the girl she had been in her youth, when she had always put on another string of beads rather than take one off.

“And I feel wonderful as well.” Even the way Ruth laughed was elegant. “But don’t you worry. Starting tomorrow, we’ll spend all our time looking after you and your happiness.” She frowned as she plucked at Marie’s dress. “The first thing we’ll do is get you some new clothes—we can’t have you running around in these old things. I suppose I should consider myself lucky that you didn’t turn up wearing those famous pants of yours!”

Marie felt a twinge of shame as she climbed into the car behind her sister. She resolved not to tell anyone that she had bought this dress especially for the trip to New York. Now it seemed that had been money down the drain.

The taxi moved off slowly, and Marie gazed out the window. “I’m in New York—isn’t that crazy?” She laughed joyfully.

“And you could have been here long before. I wrote letter after letter trying to get one or the other of you to come visit me here, but what good did it do?” Ruth was only half pretending to be upset.

Marie didn’t want to let go of Ruth’s hand ever again. “My goodness, how long has it been since we saw one another?”

“Wanda had just turned one, o
r . . .
drat i
t . . .
I’m so excited I can’t even think straight,” Ruth squeaked, wiping a tear from the corner of her eye. “It’s been seventeen years, can you imagine? I feel as though we’re talking about another life.”

Marie felt tears prickling at her eyes as well.

“You know how it is at home—always too much to do and never enough hands for all the work,” she sniffled. “But I’m here now. And I’m so glad!” New York blurred before her eyes.

Nothing had prepared her for what she was feeling at this moment. Strange though it may sound, Marie was surprised at how happy she felt to see her sister again. Of course she loved her, but as girls, they had simply been too different to feel anything more than the usual family fondness—Ruth had gone one way and Marie had gone another, as far as such a thing was possible in the narrow little house they shared.

“That aside,
you
could have visited
us
, you know!” she said once she had dried her tears. Then she shrank back into her seat, startled, as another car came toward them and missed them by a hair’s breadth.

For the briefest of moments Ruth’s face clouded over. “You know it was never as easy as that. But not a day has passed that I didn’t think of you all. Now tell me—how was the crossing?”

Marie told her about Georgie, and how she wanted to visit her while they were both in New York.

Ruth didn’t seem especially interested in hearing more about her new friend. “And you had no trouble on arrival?”

Marie shook her head. “The border guards looked rather fierce. One of them even went through my handbag, but that was all. Then they let me on through.” She laughed briefly. “You should have seen how excited the immigrants were! We had hardly gotten past the Statue of Liberty when the whole lot of them started staring into one another’s eyes. Georgie told me that they were deathly afraid of having some sort of eye infection. ‘Trachoma,’ I think she said—anyone who’s sick with it gets sent straight back. Have you heard of such a thing?”

Ruth nodded. “I think it’s quite right that they check very carefully who they let into the country. We can’t cope with infectious disease. Just imagine, more than eleven thousand people arrive here every day! They have nothing but a bundle of old clothes under an arm, and every single one of them thinks the streets are paved with gold! But this whole business with immigration is simple, really. Four or five hours and then they’re through, and the New World awaits!”

“Did you have to come through Ellis Island back then?” Marie asked curiously. She suddenly realized that she knew next to nothing about how Ruth had left Germany.

“Good heavens, no!” Ruth waved a hand. “For one thing, there weren’t as many people arriving back then. And for another I had my papers in orde
r . . .
” She instinctively dropped her voice to a whisper, though it was most unlikely that the taxi driver understood German.

Marie giggled. “Baroness Ruthwicka von Lausche—you must have had the fright of your life, didn’t you, when you saw that Steven had gotten hold of forged papers that gave you a noble title?”

Ruth grinned. For a moment Marie thought her sister looked just like the daring young girl who had left Lauscha, and her husband, in the dead of night all those years ago.

To this day, Marie didn’t quite know why Ruth’s marriage to Thomas Heimer had failed. He was the son of one of the most prosperous glassblowers in the village, and at least at first, Ruth had been head over heels in love. But then one day she had turned up back home with all her worldly goods and her three-month-old daughter, Wanda. “I’m never going back to him,” was all she said—not a word of explanation otherwise. Johanna and Marie had had no choice but to accept it.

“Having a title certainly did me no harm,” Ruth said now. “You can hardly imagine the way people bent over backward to help. Of course that was also because I arrived with Steven. All the sam
e . . .
” She looked thoughtful. “I never felt comfortable about those forged papers. That first year was very hard. Whenever the doorbell rang, I thought, well that’s it, they’re coming to get me.” She sighed. “When Thomas finally agreed to the divorce and Steven and I could get married, a weight fell from my shoulders! I’ve felt like a new woman ever since I became Steven’s wife.”

“It’s odd—at the time I hardly noticed what was going on, somehow,” Marie replied, embarrassed.

Ruth just laughed. “And you think that’s odd? You had nothing but those baubles of yours on your mind, day and night!” Then she pointed out the window. “Look, we’re just crossing the Avenue of the Americas now. It won’t be long before we arrive.” She gave Marie a quick explanation of the city’s grid layout, with its streets and avenues that imposed some order on the chaos of Manhattan.

Marie was astonished when the taxi stopped among the soaring buildings. “You live
here
?”

“We have the top apartment,” Ruth replied proudly, pointing vaguely up to the top of the slim skyscraper before them. “Don’t tell me you never heard about our move a year ago!”

“Well, quite, but I thought someone as wealthy as Steven would live in his own hous
e . . .
”

“Not at all!” Ruth said triumphantly. “Anyone who can afford it is moving to Fifth Avenue these days. I can hardly imagine ever having lived anywhere else. Steven and I were among the first to recognize the advantages of living right in the middle of town: you need fewer staff to run an apartment, you’re much closer to the shops and the opera, you don’t have all the bother of a garde
n . . .
Let me tell you, it won’t be long before they
all
leave their old houses! Fifth Avenue is already called Millionaire’s Row, I’ll have you know.” She snapped her fingers and the taxi driver followed her through the elegant front door with Marie’s luggage. Marie followed—and then stopped, thunderstruck.

“I don’t believe it!” She looked around, astonished.

Over a hundred square yards of red marble stretched out before her, with gilded benches of black granite lining the edges and vast palms growing in pots by the walls. The whole back wall of the lobby was one vast aquarium in which fish in every color of the rainbow swam among coral and strange-looking plants. Just as Marie was expecting a parrot to fly out and land on her shoulder, a uniformed page boy opened the elevator door. Marie followed her sister hesitantly into the elevator cage, a gleaming chamber of bronze and glass, which began to glide upward.

“Well, this is living, isn’t it?” Ruth said, her eyes gleaming with amusement. “You won’t see anything like this in London or Paris. This style of apartment house is a New York invention. I can hardly wait to show you my little kingdom.”

Marie felt vaguely dizzy, but she figured it was from the unaccustomed speed of the elevator.

Ruth and Steven’s apartment was no less luxurious than the imposing lobby downstairs. Long hallways to the left and right led to a multitude of vast rooms, all lavishly outfitted with mahogany furniture, Chinese carpets, and heavy silk curtains. Marie was shown to the guest suite she would occupy, complete with its own bathroom, which was decorated in pastel green from floor to ceiling. There was a brand-new set of a hairbrush, comb, and mirror laid out for her on the dresser and, alongside that, an arsenal of little pots and jars with creams and lotions that made Marie nervous just to look at. She sat down on the enormous bed to test it and then spotted a selection of ladies’ magazines on her bedside table. They had been fanned out so artfully that she could hardly imagine picking one out to read. Goodness gracious—who did Ruth imagine was coming to visit here? An opera diva?

Marie washed her hands and face quickly and left it at that—Ruth had already told her that a maid would unpack all her luggage—then set out in search of her sister.

As she walked soundlessly across the plush carpets that covered the whole length of the hallway, she found herself thinking how Ruth used to polish the stairs in their childhood home, scouring away with the block of beeswax until the wood came to a high shine. After their mother had died so young, the three sisters had divided up the housework and all the jobs in the workshop. Ruth had taken care of the cooking and most of the housework and was rarely to be seen without a cleaning cloth in her hand, or a knife for peeling potatoes. She had never complained about all the hard work, but even as a young girl she had dreamt of meeting a prince someday who would carry her off to his castle. Johanna and Marie had thought this was all empty talk and daydreaming. Marie smiled at the memory. Whoever would have thought that Ruth’s castle would be here on Fifth Avenue in New York?

Marie peered cautiously through the next door on the right. It appeared to be another parlor, this one decked out in shades of red, but just like the three other rooms she had looked into, this one was dark and deserted. She was relieved to hear the rattle of dishes from somewhere next door, and she thought she could smell coffee too. Ruth’s drawing room at last! But when Marie opened the next door, she found herself in a tiny kitchen where a red-cheeked cook was watching over several pots simmering away on the stove.

“Hello, my name is Lou-Ann. Can I help you?” she asked, heaving a large pot from the stove as she spoke and setting it down to cool on the marble kitchen counter. Without missing a beat, she went over to a window and opened it to let the smell of soup out of the room. Then she opened the oven and took out the tray of cookies that Marie had smelled from next door. Soup and broth, coffee and cookies—the smells seemed so comforting to Marie that she suddenly wanted nothing more than to sit down right there with Lou-Ann with a cookie in one hand and a glass of milk in the other.

But Ruth was waiting impatiently for her at the end of the corridor with tea and cakes.

“There you are! I thought you must be so bone-tired you’d fallen asleep. Don’t worry, you can go to bed soon enough. Steven promised to come home from work early today so that we can take an early supper. He can hardly wait to see you!”

“I’m looking forward to seeing him—your Steven is such a fine fellow,” Marie replied. “The last time I saw him was when we inaugurated the new warehouse in Sonneberg.”

Unlike Ruth, Steven had come to Thuringia every year in the early days, back when he was still working for Frank Woolworth. Once he began working for his father’s firm again, however, he didn’t come as often. Whenever he did, he made sure to look in on Ruth’s sisters, even if their business relationship didn’t strictly call for it. Steinmann-Maienbaum still made Christmas decorations for Woolworth’s stores as well as for Miles Enterprises, the Miles family’s wholesale business.

“But most of all I’m looking forward to seeing Wanda! I can hardly believe that little scrap of a girl has grown into a young woman by now. Where’s she hiding?”

Ruth sighed. “Heaven only knows where the girl is. She’s not at work; that much is certain. Her bos
s . . .
oh, forget about it. Why don’t you tell me what you think of the apartment?” She swept her arm all around.

“It’s wonderful, of course! Everything I’ve seen so far has bee
n . . .
beautiful. I can hardly wait for you to give me the grand tour! You could fit a whole street of Lauscha houses in here,” Marie replied. It was odd, she thought as she spoke, that Ruth didn’t want to talk more about her daughter. When she had first become a mother, she had talked about little else. Marie hadn’t quite understood how anyone could talk for hours about a babe in arms, and had found the whole thing rather tiresome back then.

“Your drawing room is especially elegant. It’s so different!” Marie swept her hand around at the sleek black furniture, decorated only with modest inlay work. Dotted about the room were a bust of a pensive girl, a nude marble figure with long hair cascading down her back, and a bronze sylph.

“You were probably expecting me to make myself a doll’s house of a room, full of flounces and lace curtains,” Ruth replied, feigning indignation. “Come here, I’ll show you something I’m really proud of.” She walked over to a glass-topped table. Under the pane was a recessed tray, lined with black velvet, holding a whole swarm of butterflies and dragonflies, an array of brooches showing ladies’ profiles, and peacock feathers.