The Mysterious Edge of the Heroic World (20 page)

“I was at peace with it. I received a lot of attention. Besides, I was indulged. Daddy always supplemented my income, so I lived very well. I was happy. Mother was not. Mother was ambitious for me—as I was her product. Mother always insisted on having the immaculate best, and as long as I was in Europe, I was invisible in St. Malo, and Mother could keep the
Vindicator
informed about her diva daughter's triumphs on the continent.

“Onstage, dressed as a boy or draped as a bitch, my voice carried me through many roles. However, there came a day when the director of the opera company I was with decided that the opera
Salome
was to be done in modern dress. Salome herself was to wear a slinky red
dress that he knew I could not fit into. Furthermore, this director had also decided that when Salome was to unwind the seventh veil, she was to be starkers. Well, hardly anyone wanted to see that much of me.”

Mrs. Zender paused. “I'm waiting,” she said. “That was a laugh line. I'm waiting for my laugh.”

“Later,” Mrs. Vanderwaal said coldly.

“Well,” Mrs. Zender said, “she who laughs last . . .”

Mrs. Wilcox again took a cue. “Please continue, Mrs. Zender.”

Mrs. Zender threw up her hands and said, “I was dismissed. Daddy was investing a lot of money into his mills to convert them from manufacturing cardboard into manufacturing wallboard for the postwar building boom, so he was not in a financial position to continue my subsidy.

“Mother knew before I did that my time on the stage was over. Most divas extend their careers by concertizing. But I could not. Being alone on stage, not playing a role, was not something I was suited for, and my name recognition was not great enough to fill a concert hall. Besides, I could not manage all that travel without people. Mother and I both knew that I would have to return to St. Malo. I had made peace with that, but Mother wanted something more. She wanted to find me something to return
with—a proper accessory that would make me acceptable to St. Malo society.”

Mrs. Zender stopped abruptly and stared into the middle distance. Almost intuitively, Mrs. Wilcox responded by clearing her throat, a small noise but enough to make Mrs. Zender look in her direction. With the slightest nod of her head, Mrs. Wilcox directed Mrs. Zender's attention to the large envelope, which Mrs. Vanderwaal continued to hold. She handed it over, and Mrs. Zender laid it across her lap without opening it. She ran her hand over it and looked at it for a long time before starting again. “In 1955 Vienna was in the throes of restoring itself to its former grandeur. The famous Lipizzaner horses had been saved, and the old Spanish Riding School was back in business. The Vienna Boys' Choir was singing again, and the pride of Vienna, the State Opera House, destroyed by fire during the Second World War, was to rise from its ashes.”

“And this is important why?” Mrs. Vanderwaal asked.

“What I have to say about the Vienna Opera House is relevant to
The Moon Lady.
And that is why you are here, is it not, Mrs. Vanderwaal?”

“It is.”

“Then you must be patient.”

“Would you call waiting fifty years for an answer being patient, Mrs. Zender?”

“Yes, but I told you that I cannot tell overlapping parts at the same time like an opera. I have to tell things consecutively, because that is the way people tell stories. What I have to say about the Vienna Opera House is relevant.”

“Then go on.”

In a childish gesture, Mrs. Zender turned as far away as she could from Mrs. Vanderwaal without actually moving her chair. She straightened her back and continued almost defiantly.

“Back to 1955,” she said. “Vienna was newly independent, and the government had adopted a policy of not hiring ex-Nazis for high-level positions. But the war had been over for ten years, and the Austrians were finding ways to accommodate men who had special talents but who may have had a questionable past. It is called
Austrian amnesia,
a term I suggest you remember.

“The State Opera House was reopened to great fanfare on November 5, 1955. The audience for the gala reopening was a specially invited international crowd. Ordinary people, the uninvited, lined up outside the opera house to watch the lucky ticket holders arrive. Like the funerals of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Princess Diana, a public
address system was set up so that the uninvited could hear what was going on inside. The opera was Beethoven's
Fidelio.
The conductor was Karl Böhm, a man who only seventeen years before had publicly welcomed Hitler's takeover of Austria. Everything about that evening was secondary to the one big question: Would the acoustics in the new house be as superb as they once had been? The answer was yes, they were.”

“Were you there?” Amedeo asked.

“No. I was not, but Mother was.”

“After her death, during one of my brief attempts to sort through and organize Mother's papers, I found the program from the gala reopening of the Vienna State Opera House. It had an elaborate, tasseled, deep blue velour cover, and inside was a list of the invited guests. Mother's name was there and so was Mr. Zender's.”

Then suddenly, as if a puppet master had pulled an arm string, Mrs. Zender held up the envelope and asked Mrs. Vanderwaal, “What will I find in this envelope?”

“Papers. A photo. A handwritten memoir.”

Mrs. Zender smiled knowingly and laid the envelope back down. Then, as if she were addressing a class and was asking for a show of hands, she asked, “Do any of you know about the Stockholm Syndrome?”

Only Mrs. Wilcox nodded yes—almost imperceptibly.

Without attempting to disguise the sarcasm in her voice, Mrs. Vanderwaal asked, “Is that another term you suggest we remember?”

“Yes, it is,” Mrs. Zender replied. “Mother died on August 23, 1973, the very day there was a botched bank robbery in Sweden. The robbers took four people and held them hostage for six days. The hostages—three women and a man—resisted the government's efforts to help them. Even after their rescue, one of the women remained friends with the criminals. That is the incident that gave birth to the term
Stockholm Syndrome.
It has come to mean a hostage bonding with his captors.” Mrs. Zender paused dramatically before continuing. “The
Stockholm Syndrome
has been used to explain Patty Hearst, members of religious cults, and battered spouses.” To Mrs. Zender's credit, she did not look at Mrs. Wilcox when she said that.

“There are many ways a person can become a hostage. A captor can be a parent, a husband”—again she did not look at Mrs. Wilcox—“or it can be a social scene.

“Within two years after Mother died, Mr. Zender lost Father's business, and a hurricane named Eloise peeled back the roof over Mr. Zender's annex, took down the dock, the boathouse, and the top floor of the three-car garage, and the parties stopped. The older generation—
Mother's friends—soon found other venues, and the younger generation, the backyard barbequers/summers-in-Provence generation, never missed us. We were the Great Gatsby, after all, except that there was no green light blinking at the end of the dock. Hurricane Eloise took care of that, too.

“Mr. Zender and I continued to live here on Mandarin Road even after the money ran out. Mr. Zender adjusted his lifestyle from that of the landed gentry to that of the retired foreign diplomat. He found a silver-tipped cane somewhere in the house and started walking with a heroic limp. I think Mr. Zender made medical history as the first case on record where a cane caused a limp.”

Mrs. Zender unfastened the little wing clip on the manila envelope and turned up the flap. She looked inside briefly, teasingly, but made no effort to take anything out. She laid the envelope back on her lap and folded her hands over it.

Amedeo asked, “Aren't you going to look inside? Don't you want to know—”

Mrs. Zender said, “Everyone knows that it's not over until the fat lady sings.” She picked the envelope back up and pulled out the photo. She hesitated, looked at it briefly, and said, “I need my loupe. William, my loupe.”
While William went to look for her magnifying glass, Mrs. Zender put on her eyeglasses and studied the picture.

Her audience was silent.

When William returned with the magnifying glass, to everyone's surprise, Mrs. Vanderwaal took it from him. Her impatience was corporeal, like a sixth person in the room. She walked—almost strutted—behind the circle of chairs until she was standing behind Mrs. Zender. Holding the loupe in her hand, she reached over Mrs. Zender's shoulder and focused on the figure on the left. “That young man,” she said, jabbing at the glass, “that young man, the one on the left, is my late husband. Do you see him?” she asked. Mrs. Zender nodded. Mrs. Vanderwaal moved the magnifier ever so slightly until it was focused on the calendar on the wall. “And that is
The Moon Lady,
your wedding gift from Mr. Zender. Do you see it?”Mrs. Zender nodded again. Mrs. Vanderwaal withdrew the loupe and said, “And that, Mrs. Zender, is the fat lady we want to hear.”

Mrs. Zender countered with an equal impatience, “I told you, Mrs. Vanderwaal, this isn't opera. I have to tell things one at a time.”

Not even Mrs. Wilcox could discharge the current in the room, but William did. He pulled the pages of Johannes's memoir from the envelope and calmly started
to read. William read fluently, allowing the pain to arrive softly from the poetry within the awkward prose. He read beyond the page where Mrs. Vanderwaal had stopped.

To me at fifteen years, that Pieter wore the
Rosa Winkel
was for me both a surprise and not a surprise.

Pieter was a homosexual, but he was much more than that. He was my brother, my parent, my guardian, my friend. As was also Klaus. My thoughts had been always the self-centered thoughts of a boy. All my thoughts were with me at the center. Everything was in relation to me. There was Pieter and me. Klaus and me. Jacob and me. Gerard and me. There were my teachers, my school, my friends and me, me, me . . . . Nothing could exist that did not have me, Johannes van der Waal, at its beginning. I never once thought about what might be between Klaus and Pieter. My brother was the shop owner and Klaus was his manager. Klaus was also my brother's roommate. I, Johannes, got along with both of them, and they got along with each other. Like everything else, there was always me in relation to them. Not them in relation to each other.

It was the Nazis who made a label for Pieter. The Nazis made a label for everyone. Besides the Yellow Stars, they had triangles of brown for Gypsies and purple for Jehovah's Witnesses. The Nazis believed that if they know
how you were born as a Jew or a Gypsy or a homosexual, they know everything about you and can make a label for it. But what did these labels tell you about the person who wore them? The Nazis did not have labels for kind and generous and brave and smart and a good friend and a good son and a good, good, good brother.

I had known my brother, Pieter, all of my life—all fifteen years of my life—and yet I did not know him. I knew only the parts that I could see through my eyes and feel in my heart. That was a lot, but the rest was like listening in the back-back room, where from behind the wall, you must guess at what you are seeing from what you are hearing, and the sounds, they are muffled.

The Nazis could never make a label for Pieter van der Waal. The Nazis knew as much about Pieter van der Waal as the amount of him that the
Rosa Winkel
covered: a small, flat Pink Triangle.

Gerard now handed to me the photograph he had taken of me and my brother, Pieter, inside the gallery on the night of the retirement party.

I did not cry.

I could not cry.

I think now that I did not cry because for a long time I had been waiting for it to come—without knowing what it was. Without knowing, I knew that the call-up would
come. I did not know that Pieter would be a
Rosa Winkel,
but I knew that the Nazi occupiers would find some reason to break up our family. Within me for a long time had been that fear. Maybe I did not suspect the
Rosa Winkel.
Maybe I thought they will take Pieter because he was helping to hide the paintings of the Rijksmuseum. Maybe I had the fear with me because since the day of the Occupation, every day, everything from eating to opening a door is marked by caution, caution, haste, haste, wait, wait. But the name of it all—caution, haste, wait—the name of it all is fear.

To Gerard, I did not speak. I could not.

I think now that I could not speak anything because there was nothing to say. To speak of my sadness was like reciting a passage that had been long ago memorized, so I did not recite the end because already I knew what it was.

All those unsaid words I could not say rose up into my throat to keep down the tears.

I looked at the photograph for a very long time. I knew that this was what I will ever see of my brother, Pieter, again.

When William laid down the pages, a swollen silence filled the room, and only then did Johannes's pain become audible.

Everyone cried.

They cried all the tears that Johannes had not.

They cried for Johannes himself, and they cried for the Dutch brother he once was and for John, the American husband and father he became. And they cried for Pieter, the
Rosa Winkel
hero they would never know.

Mrs. Zender's eye makeup streaked down her face, making punch marks like a clown.

Mrs. Wilcox found a roll of paper towels, which she passed around for everyone to use as Kleenex, and in one tender moment, Mrs. Vanderwaal reached over to Mrs. Zender, removed her glasses, and gently dabbed away the black streaks of mascara. Mrs. Zender caught Mrs. Vanderwaal's hand as she was about to remove it. “Thanks,” she whispered. Mrs. Vanderwaal didn't answer.