She remembers her debut. The eyes all on her, not just the men but the women, too, whether jealous or shamed or in unabashed worship. She remembers descending the stairs on a cloud, her tiara held in place with so many hairpins that she thought her head would break off and roll away. Dancing and champagne and young men’s sweaty hands slipped into hers over and over. Her mother pointing out a certain young man in a narrowly cut jacket. That is Louis Muller, of the Mullers.
And her wedding.
She remembers early summers in Bar Harbor, the gleaming sailboats white, so white, her smocks flawless and dry even in the woolly heat. She changed her outfit four times a day: after breakfast, after lunch, in the afternoon before tea, and then for dinner. So many meals, piled high with those coarse American dishes she would never quite get used to, the Southern-style cornbread that her father-in-law liked but that tasted to Bertha like a block of animal feed. She ate sparingly. While other women talked about the need to reduce, she wore a bathing costume that emphasized her bust. She was the most divine creature on the Eastern Seaboard. So said her father-in-law. Dear Walter. He called her his little Bavarian rose; never mind that her family came from Heidelberg. He was always a little in love with her, openly scornful of his son’s indifference. What a catch Louis had landed, what radiance, what wit, what charm, what skill. She could play the piano. How many girls had a figure like hers? She could count them on one hand. And could any of those girls play the piano? She could count them on one hand, too … if you cut off all her fingers … but then she wouldn’t be able to play the piano. Ha ha ha ha. Walter always implied that, had the vagaries of time not torn them asunder … But she ended up with Louis. Oh Louis. Dear Louis. She wants to be charitable to him. She will choose to think of him fondly.
Think of the delight he took in buying her things, how he loved to adorn her. In the cushions of her house, she has lost diamonds worth a king’s ransom. Think of how he took her everywhere. After David was born she felt sad. It came from nowhere and gummed up her mind. Nights she could not sleep; dragging herself from bed in the morning became torture. To cheer her, Louis bought a villa in Portofino. Every summer after that they would spend a month, the baby tucked away with a nurse and Louis promising not to work at all. They would eat rich meals and drink luscious wines and travel the coast, down to Rome or round the bend to Monaco, where the Prince himself would escort them through the casino. They played with chips made of real gold. Servants brought deep saucers sloshing with champagne and wet towels to cool their necks. And then during the War, when travel became impossible, Louis bought another house for her, a thirty-five-thousand-acre ranch in the middle of Montana. She tired of it quickly. He sold it at a loss. He bought her a home in Deal. He did whatever she wanted. He was a good husband. She cannot think of him now without tearing up; oh, how maudlin. He was a decent man, after all. She was glad that he went without suffering. His heart stopped a few months before the birth of David’s first child. What is the girl’s name. Amelia. For a moment she almost forgot, but she triumphed through sheer willpower. Amelia, yes. And her baby brother, Edgar. The year after Edgar
was born, her old friend Elisabeth died. Elisabeth’s husband had been an officer in the SS and after the War they got to him; the stress killed him and then her. What luck. What timing. Every time David has a baby someone dies. A lesser woman might have ordered him to stop having children. He had a son and a daughter; enough already, stop killing off the rest of us. If anyone is to go next it will be her. But she was glad when Yvette got pregnant, regardless of the outcome. Bertha will sacrifice herself for the cause, because Yvette will be a good mother, far better than David’s first wife, who Bertha never liked and never approved of, even though she and Louis played along for appearance’s sake. They even footed more than their share of the bill at the wedding. David argued that they should foot the entire bill; it wasn’t as though they had a shortage of funds. Everyone argued. David was twenty-five then and his bachelorhood had begun to worry her; he might turn out to have his father’s tendencies. Where she had never doubted her own ability to manage Louis, how could she ensure that a prospective daughter-in-law would have the same strength and conviction? Women could not be relied on. Nobody could be relied on. You had to do everything yourself these days. Thankfully, David did get married. A relief to her, on the one hand; and on the other hand, she did not trust the girl he chose, the daughter of a man who owned clothing stores in the Middle West. She called New York ugly. Who was she to be so stuck-up, she came from Cleveland. Whatever Bertha’s opinions of the changes that have taken place in the city since her arrival so many years ago, she firmly believes that nobody has the right to make comments when they’ve been in residence for less than a month. That wicked girl. Bertha can remember her name all right but chooses not to. Picking fights with David over everything, making scenes everywhere, icy dinners where nobody spoke: Bertha thinks about them and suddenly two sets of memories collide: silence and silver on china and crystal on linen … and silences, and andand notes delivered by hand, notes from Dr. Fetchett. No, that is not right. That did not happen then. She is mixing up the chronology and she does not want to think about certain things. With tremendous strain she turns the page and finds another one, a page full of good memories, another
night, a happy occasion … back to her wedding. Think about her wedding. Think about the liveried footmen and the mighty brass instruments and the dancing legions spinning in her honor; think about her wedding cake, that magnificent tower of buttercream in the shape of a pyramid, the biggest cake anyone had ever seen; they printed a picture of it in the newspaper, and her picture, too. The wedding of Mr. L. I. Muller and Miss Bertha Steinholtz proved undoubtedly the most spectacular event of the season. The bride wore a taffeta gown of surpassing elegance, and the groom his traditional black. The ceremony was performed at the Trinity Church by the Most Reverend J. A. Moffett, and festivities continued… . They called it a fairy tale, and for once they got it right. Her life has been magical.
And now she is old and in a bed and it is 1962. There are things that remain hidden. They should not bother her now, not after so much time. Water under the bridge. But memory, nasty beast, returns again and again.
Not the girl. She can think about the girl without flinching. She has never doubted her decisions and she does not doubt them now. There was too much at stake. Louis could never see that. He told her once that she had no heart but that just showed how deeply he misunderstood the world, how deeply he misunderstood her. She did what she did not because she lacked a heart but because she knew, all too well, how merciless people could be. She remembered being mocked, nightly sobbing, pillows soaked, years of struggle before she came into her own and they could not deny her any longer. Because she was beautiful, and beauty cannot be denied.
But for the girl? An eternity of faux pas. She stood to suffer. What Louis failed to grasp was that Bertha had been acting with mercy.
For David’s tenth birthday she threw a luncheon, hired entertainment, and opened the ballroom. After dessert David played his violin for the guests, most of whom were adults, friends of hers; in those days, he did not have many friends. All told a pleasant afternoon, at least until Louis bolted from the room. She found him on the edge of his bed, face in his handkerchief. It disgusted her: this soft cruelty he had the gall to call mercy. He did not know what true mercy meant. He had never suffered. He had been coddled, fawned over, given a pass on the most vile transgressions. So naturally he assumed that the world would do the same for the girl. Bertha knew better. She knew disgrace. All she wanted was to spare the girl the same.