“Linda.”
“No. No, I’m all right. Do you want to sleep with me? I mean sleep. You can if you want to. No, because of Robin.”
“If she wakes up and nobody’s there—”
“I know. And we wouldn’t just sleep. I can’t talk anymore.”
“I’ll go.”
“I want you to go but I don’t want you to go. I’m glad about us. I’m going to say something once and I’ll never say it again.”
“Let me. I love you, Linda.”
“Oh, I love you.”
II
The Edge of Thought
Here’s a gray afternoon, bleak as to freeze
The edge of thought like a hacksaw. Chinese
Die in the news, this wind on them
Cold as a garden...
Nine
Tannhauser’s was located on the western bank of the Delaware three miles south of New Hope. A large Colonial mansion had been converted into a restaurant, with the entire eastern wall replaced by a picture window. The results of this renovation were much to the advantage of Trude Hofmeister’s patrons, who were afforded a panoramic view of the river. The view was better from the inside; across the river, New Jersey residents called Tannhauser’s “that abortion.”
Born in Bavaria two weeks to the day before Sarajevo, Trude grew up with a passion for hearty food and equally hearty music. She moved to Vienna when her schooling was completed and at the time of the Anschluss had indulged both appetites generously. A mezzosoprano, she appeared regularly in Wagnerian opera at the Vienna State Opera House. Her affection for Wagner was matched by her enthusiasm for Viennese cuisine, and her figure more than conformed to the standard for her profession. By 1938 she had acquired a strong critical reputation and a not unattractive corpulence.
She had also acquired a husband. Gunther Loebner was a respected journalist, a boulevardier, a coffeehouse habitué, a man of immense courtly charm and elegant manners. He was also a Social Democrat, and a vocal one. The day the Anschluss was signed he put his wife in a first-class compartment of a train bound for Paris. He would not be persuaded to share the ride with her.
“I have work,” he told her. “It will not take long “but it is essential that it be done. Perhaps a week, hardly more. In less than ten days I shall be with you in Montparnasse.”
“In less than ten days you will be in prison,” she said, but she did not speak the words until the train had pulled out of the station, and no tears showed in her eyes while she waved good-bye.
She was wrong. Loebner was never in prison. Two days after her arrival in Paris he was shot dead by two flint-eyed young Berliners. The official announcement had it that he had died while resisting arrest. In forty-two years Gunther Loebner had resisted any number of things, but arrest had never been among and his sole weapons of resistance had been his pen and his tongue.
In the years immediately following, the international audience for Wagnerian opera declined dramatically. Its popularity remained at peak within the Third Reich — indeed, little else was ever aired on German radio — but opera buffs in other countries seemed curiously to have lost their taste for it.
For a time Gunther Loebner’s widow lost her taste for singing in general. She canceled her engagements and spent most of her time by herself. Two months after her arrival in Paris, she was approached by a young man attached to the German embassy. He explained that he brought condolences for the death of her husband and that it was hoped she would return soon to the Fatherland. The Führer owned all her records and had several times watched her perform, both in Vienna and in Munich. It was hoped a Berlin performance could be arranged.
She said only that she had ceased to sing. But this was impossible, he told her. One could appreciate that she was bereaved, but time would end her bereavement, and she would perform better than ever.
“If I sing again,” she said icily, “I shall sing in Paris.”
He flashed a superior smile. “They sing little Wagner in Paris, Fraulein Hofmeister. Return to Berlin. In two years’ time you shall sing Wagner in Paris and it would not do to be out of practice.”
She walked into the kitchen and he followed her, talking persuasively. There was a wedge-shaped chef’s knife on the kitchen counter. For a moment she was very near to using that knife to open up his corset-flattened belly. She saw it all in her mind, the mechanics of the act, even the story of attempted rape which would satisfy the sympathetic French police.
But no. There were too many of them and they were all like this one. If one stroke of the knife would do for all of them — but it would not.
For the next few months she remembered his prediction. In two years’ time the German Army would be in Paris. She tried to forget the words but every sign and portent assured her they were true. In the spring she sailed to New York, and that September Hitler’s tanks crossed into Poland.
She spent the war in New York. She sang, but never opera. She sang Kurt Weill, and her most successful number was “Pirate Jenny” from Three-Penny Opera. There was a room in Hitler’s Museum of Decadent Arts where Der Dreigroschenoper was played continually from morning to night. It was the most popular room in the museum; it was the only place in Germany where you could hear the music.
She gave up singing professionally shortly after the war, married a wealthy German Jew who had left the country early enough to get much of his wealth out with him. He was a widower with grown children and he told her she made him alive again. He was also a great fan of Wagnerian opera; neither its political implications nor the racial theories of its creator, he insisted, had any influence on the way it sounded to him.
They spent nights listening to records together. In his company she learned to love again the music she had always loved. But she would not sing it for him. Twice he asked her, and the second time she told him of her conversation with the German attaché in Paris. He listened without comment and never repeated the request.
He died in 1956. He was hospitalized for six weeks after a heart attack and was recovering slowly but surely when his kidneys failed. She had just returned home from the hospital when the phone rang. It was the doctor, the son of close friends of her husband, telling her to come back immediately. Outside his door they told her it was a matter of an hour or so. He was not in pain, he was conscious, and there was nothing to be done.
“Leave us,” she said.
She stood at his bedside and held his hand. When she was with him an hour ago his face had life and now it was a death’s head. She said, “David? I will sing for you.”
She sang Wagner. She sang in full voice while her husband’s doctor stood outside the door with folded arms, fielding one complaint after another. She sang one aria after the next, everything she could remember, and her memory that day was unimpaired. For two full hours she sang without a break, his hand in hers. Nurses moved in and out of the room and she sang uninterrupted. She was still holding his hand and singing when a hollow-eyed nurse took her arm and told her, he was gone.
She traveled. She bought presents for his grandchildren. In 1961 she bought the present Tannhauser’s from the creditors of the man who had tried to turn it into a restaurant. He had decorated it in an American Colonial motif and matched the decor with a basic American menu. She kept the decor but substituted a Viennese menu.
She supervised every detail of the operation, bought the produce, greeted guests on arrival and departure. She even did most of the baking. Her chef, with her from the beginning, was excellent, but he could not match her sachertorte, her pfannkuchen, her strudel. She had been too busy to bake for Gunther Loebner, but David Wolf had never ceased to praise her strudel.