I felt a brief flash of pleasure, as if I had solved something or found a wad of money in the trash. Besides Molly’s voice
itself, this is what I had most wanted to hear. But my gratified faith, my forensic pleasure soon gave way to larger doubts.
What do you mean, she is still singing? Where? To whom? And where would Martin Breeze, barely qualified to be an opera critic,
obtain this insight anyway? Before long I had gotten dressed and was halfway downstairs before I realized that it was Sunday
and that Breeze would be nowhere near his office at the
Trumpet
. My detective work, such as it was, would have to wait until morning.
T
HE
T
RUMPET
BUILDING
was one of the gorgeously encrusted brick buildings that lined old downtown. An ornate exterior frieze depicted Gutenberg
perfecting his press, Luther translating the Bible into German, a medieval printer setting a block of type. Trude’s early
builders, those taciturn, credulous men, had known how to lay brick and cover it with carved stone. The building was half-empty
now. The paper was abandoning the upper floors as circulation dwindled. I approached the front desk and a pink-nailed receptionist
wearing a plaid skirt, belt, and pantyhose guided me toward an elevator with an old-fashioned brass grate. It was a creaky,
uncertain ascent to the fourteenth floor. When I stepped off the elevator onto the worn carpet, I was relieved to see a band
of light extending from Breeze’s open door. I walked to the threshold and paused there. He had his leather jacket on and hunched
close to a keyboard. Hearing my knock, he turned, the light from the dangling unsheathed bulb glinting off his round glasses.
The rotation brought down his long gray fringe of hair. It was like a curtain he was constantly
emerging from and retreating behind. He opened it with a casual flick of his hand.
“The ventilation in this place is wretched,” Breeze said. “I’m trying to get a space heater up here. They tell me I might
get the managing editor’s. The old guy can’t be trusted with a heater anymore—he leaned too close to it and his tweed coat
caught on fire!” Breeze laughed nervously. “You should have seen him flapping around alight. I haven’t run into you at the
opera lately, Norberg.”
“True. I hear Molly is still singing though.”
“Hmm?” Breeze fumbled for a pencil and began chewing on it.
“I hear Molly is still singing.” I passed Breeze a copy of his column, with the acrostic circled in red pen.
His hands trembled slightly as he inspected it. “Huh!” he said. He thought a moment. “You know, I have much less control over
my column than you might think,” he said. “When I was first hired here I had my youthful pretensions, but now I realize greater
forces are at work. Take this building,” he said. “Do you think it would be possible for a liberal paper to be housed in such
a gloriously conservative building?” He pulled his collar up around his neck and shrank inside the leather jacket, looking
pale and frosty in the blue light of his computer. “I am allowing larger forces to work through me. Anyone could do the job.”
He caught me with a significant eye before tossing back his hair. “Someone else with an average intelligence, vocabulary,
and grasp of fundamental music theory and opera history could do the job equally well. You could do the job equally well,
Norberg. That is what I realize now. I am a vassal. That is to say, a vessel. I am a body through which the language passes.”
“So you had nothing to do with this acrostic.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” Breeze said, reaching for one of the paper clips that filled his ashtray. It occurred to me that this
was the first time I’d spoken to Breeze without a buffet between us. “You know me—I try to follow the plots. Sometimes it’s
not easy. Now, was the printed version of the Ariel Perloff article essentially my words, my thoughts? Yes. The gist was,
Ariel Perloff is an embarrassment to our otherwise surprisingly decent opera company. Was the final column an exact, verbatim
transcript of my words? I don’t know. Let’s face it, I’m not writing poetry here. Did I embed some sort of message about your
wife in the article, which would rely on an exact knowledge of how the article would be typeset, not to mention a lot of inside
knowledge about your wife, which nobody seems to have, not even the police?”
“So you’re saying that the arts editor …”
“No,” said Breeze. “I’m saying that I was a bit player in this. A cipher, a scribe, a channel for language at best. Do you
really think that I’m the kind of guy to play all sorts of fancy word games?”
I sighed and sank back against the armchair cushions, which did not yield. “I had to read your column to find out what she
was thinking.”
“You mean that interview?” Breeze unbent a paper clip. “That was a full week before she unfortunately—”
“Yes,” I said, “we weren’t speaking all that much at the end.”
W
HILE
K
YLE SPENT HIS EVENINGS AT CHURCH
, I
WENT TO
the mall. What odd peace I found there. Smoking in the parking lot’s vast floodlit grid, I was supervised by the gray bulb
of the water tower. At night the pace of commerce slowed and the halls were strangely hushed. Muzak played to a deserted food
court. Tired retailers became sculptural and enigmatic in their chairs, languidly counting the day’s take. I pressed past
the kiosks and novelty stations and moved deeper in.
Perlmutter’s Bookshop, stationed along an obscure curve of the mall’s third ring, was not a thriving concern even in peak
hours. Perlmutter himself had died six months before, leaving a legacy of customer complaints and unclassified volumes. The
woman who’d taken it over had shoulder-length brown hair and wore cashmere sweaters and plaid skirts. Clara was her name,
freshly printed on the plastic badge she wore around her neck.
The pleasure I took watching her struggle to organize the shop was hard to locate or justify. Lately I’d had plenty of time
to contemplate how long it had been since I’d touched a woman’s body, and in truth I was having a harder time enjoying my
videos: I kept getting hung up on the fact that the belles of
Card Catalog Confidential
weren’t real librarians. They probably weren’t even readers, those lithe and tweed-skirted belles. Clara, by contrast, was
the genuine article, a laid-off librarian forced by circumstance to confront Perlmutter’s mostly used inventory. She worked
in a systematic way, pulling and sorting from the beached boxes that lined the aisles, climbing stepladders to slot an orphaned
title in, bending over the desk to check her bibliography on the computer. She had a peculiar sigh that started sharp, then
slid down to cadence.
I grabbed a copy of Bernhard’s memoir from the stack on the desk and brought it to the corner armchair. At this outpost I
could read, or watch Clara, or gaze through the front windows at the consumers walking the hedge labyrinth, heads down. Toward
closing time Clara would settle behind the desk herself, and the only sounds in the shop were our turning pages.
I only broke this silence once, to ask whether I was bothering her.
“I don’t mind,” she said. “I kind of enjoy having you there, like a gargoyle or something.”
I smiled and returned to my reading.
M
EMOIRS OF
M
Y
N
ERVOUS
I
LLNESS
took its title from a book published in 1903 by Daniel Paul Schreber, a baroquely crazy Prussian judge who wrote a long,
vivid, heavily footnoted book to establish his sanity and in the end proved just the opposite. Bernhard’s memoir was published
posthumously
in 1984 and seemed to have been written with great reluctance. Feeling that his buildings were unappreciated, watching his
“slum of a body” decay daily, Bernhard wrote his bitter book from the newly completed Traumhaus during one of Trude’s coldest
winters. “I spent my whole life waiting for a convalescence that never arrived,” he wrote from the Schreber Suite. Bernhard
had left Europe almost fifty years before. Disgusted by the athletic bodies on display at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, he fled
to America, though he avoided the orange groves and beaches of Southern California favored by so many of his fellow émigrés,
settling instead in Trude, “a city that was as sick as I was.” Depression-era Trude was a truly bleak place, as the theatres
and mansions of the 1890s had already fallen to ruin, without gaining the historic cachet they have today.
The young Bernhard found work at a brick-export business and lived in a squalid rooming house, where he worked on his English,
lost his virginity to a toothless prostitute, and contemplated what he called “the Weimar solution.” His despair lessened
as his English improved, and he discovered the haven of the Central Library, chiseled with uplifting quotes and studded with
churchlike stained glass windows. He studied European and American architecture at a long wooden desk every night until the
library closed.
Bernhard’s work as a brick exporter brought him into contact with buffs and preservationists, who often waited at the sites
Bernhard was sent to, imploring his firm not to demolish the buildings it had cheaply bought. It saddened Bernhard to destroy
an early movie house or a grand and decrepit hotel, but he saw his work as necessary violence. “I was a clearer of rubble,
a germane
destroyer of old forms,” he writes, with characteristic wry hyperbole. He soon encountered architects as well. Horst von Hartsig,
the well-known beaux arts architect and winner of the Prix de Rome, took special notice of the ambitious young man. He hired
Bernhard as an assistant in 1942. “A useless person, who tacked a ‘von’ onto his name to impress naive Midwesterners,” writes
his former protégé. “Von Hartsig’s false nobility did not enhance the quality of his buildings.”
This may be a retrospective justification on Bernhard’s part. Soon after accepting the job, Bernhard seduced von Hartsig’s
wife, Ulli, who remained Bernhard’s great love until the end of his life. He even built an Ulli Room in the Traumhaus to memorialize
her “gentle but genuine madness.” Still in the “daze of Ulli,” the young architect took the lead in several von Hartsig projects,
including the restoration of the Opera House. While Bernhard found these projects disgustingly conventional, he gained practical
experience, and fought his first battles with the infamous Trude zoning board. Von Hartsig continued to promote his assistant’s
career, which led to several commissions, mostly houses, in the late 1940s.
The great split between von Hartsig and Bernhard occurred in 1951. The two men stopped speaking for reasons that can be easily
inferred. Bernhard left von Hartsig to start his own firm, and the two volleyed invective through the editorial pages of architectural
journals for the next decade. To Bernhard’s dismay, Ulli chose to stay with von Hartsig even after the revelation of her affair.
After von Hartsig’s death in 1964, she never remarried, dying herself soon after in 1968. Oddly, von Hartsig’s will designated
Bernhard as the architect of his tomb—either a final gesture of forgiveness or vanity winning out. Perhaps von Hartsig
wanted more than anything to survive, if only as a footnote in his entomber’s biography. After Ulli’s death, her coffin was
lowered into the adjoining plot.
Bernhard’s grief, no doubt, contributed to the magisterial melancholy of his later work. The Ringstrasse Mall, “misunderstood
by millions of corn eaters,” was his great statement on the impossibility of fulfillment within a capitalist culture. It was
very nearly never built. Fourteen years in the making, construction was delayed every step of the way, with Bernhard fighting
heroically—others would say megalomaniacally—for the total realization of his vision. The mall was his
gesamtkunstwerk
, complete with outdoor leisure park, an amphitheater for classical music, latticed follies where serious young people could
write novels, and a monorail line that would feed mallgoers to the downtown area and vice versa. Some of these features were
sacrificed during the construction process, causing Bernhard to disown the project almost immediately after its completion.
He reminded his partners that he (Bernhard) was the only one who knew the solution to the mall’s central labyrinth, and would
only reveal this secret when his specifications were met. They never were.
The Traumhaus was the consummation of Bernhard’s late style. Funded by the wealthy heiress of a vacuum cleaner fortune, who
gave Bernhard a blank check in exchange for a room in the finished asylum, Bernhard began work on his most personal project
in 1977. He had been suffering from severe health problems for the past few years and realized he did not have long to live.
Childhood memories came flooding back to him, inspiring the Alpine-style hiking paths and the artificial mountain he added
to the wooded 120-acre lot. The plan for the Traumhaus was just as finical and exact as the one that had hampered the
mall project, but in this case Bernhard was in almost complete control. The building’s many eccentricities must be a result
of this. Bernhard’s instructions for day-to-day operations were followed religiously after his death, probably the origin
of the Traumhaus myth that the architect was sustained on life support in the basement.
One of the Traumhaus’s major innovations was the focus on writing. “In other words,” writes Bernhard, “we wanted to reverse
the usual relationship between memoir-writing and confinement. While Judge Schreber wrote with the hope that his massively
insane book would convince the doctors to release him, we would like writing to be a means of admission. That is to say, writing
as a way
in
. If your memoir is disturbing enough, we will open a room for you here, where you can live in your dream. As long as you
continue to trouble us, you can live here in peace.” Bernhard’s memoir was the first to be submitted to the advisory board
in the spring of 1980. A month later, Bernhard was admitted as the first patient to the home he had designed.
W
E READ QUIETLY
, and on those evenings my attention was divided between Bernhard’s book and the woman I admired. It felt like a kind of mercy
to have my attention divided in this way. The architect’s voice on its own was too harsh—it needed to be diluted—so every
few pages I looked up at Clara stroking her hair or plucking eyebrows that weren’t orderly enough for her liking. When the
phone rang, it was almost always a call for Sparkles, Cuz!, an immensely popular teen boutique whose phone number differed
from the bookstore’s by only one digit. Clara offered the correct number kindly, though a look of defeat
sometimes crept over her as she hung up the phone and reached for the stereo dial to turn the music back up. Like me, she
gravitated toward the songs and etudes of the melancholy and tubercular Schubert.
The shoppers passed by, sometimes two or three times because Bernhard’s labyrinth had fooled them. They did not approach Perlmutter’s
dense shelves. They headed for the lingerie mannequins in shined windows, the balloons twisted into amusing shapes, the animatronic
madame who told fortunes and took quarters. Clara watched them go with a sigh, glancing up from her flattened pulp novel.
In the absence of customers, it was possible to mistake the bookshop for a living room, a shared privacy, and the chamber
music made me feel closer to Clara. This was what I missed most, the reliable physical presence of a woman who sometimes dipped
a strand of hair in her tea by mistake, or let her fingers graze the mole on her neck, which was somewhere to the northwest
of where Molly’s had been. It was almost enough, when Clara’s hair hung in her eyes, to pretend that I was at home reading
with my wife. That Molly would look over at me and ask me how my day had been. But then Clara would move her hair, revealing
the face of a stranger, and I was left with my usual hollowness and the guilty pleasure I found in her presence.
Regretfully, I reached the final page of Bernhard’s memoir, a surprisingly tender passage in which he spoke of Ulli as “the
missing heart” of his architecture. I closed the book, but I was out of sync with Clara, who still had a few pages left in
her detective novel. I waited for her to finish, imagining her satisfaction when the villain was outed, then carried Bernhard’s
book up to the counter.
“You’re a very careful customer,” she said.
“I like the atmosphere,” I said, almost adding “and the company.”
“Thorough.” She punched the total into the antique register, which slid out with a harsh chime. “Is there anything else I
can do for you?”
I fingered the tattered dust jacket of the warped hardback. “No,” I said. “Thank you.”
The mall foyer was full of pale shoppers who clung to half-empty bags. I turned back to look at Clara through the glass; she
rose from her desk, walked over to the armchair, and slotted her novel back in a gap in the mystery section, which had been
obstructed by the head of her gargoyle. She gave no sign of missing him, me. My car was just outside, in the Mastodon lot,
but at the last moment I opted instead for a calming detour in the maze Bernhard had built.