The Golden Hour. Beatriz Williams

call a grand tour, except I kept getting stuck in places.” He pauses. “Delaying the inevitable.”

      “What’s so inevitable?”

      “Returning home. My father’s found a place for me in chambers.”

      “What does this mean, ‘chambers’?”

      “Law. I’m meant to become a lawyer.”

      “How—how—”

      “Grown up,” he says. “Grown up and rather dull. Pretty soon I shall get married, grow a beard, and start a brood of rascals of my own, and the whole cycle will start over again.” He looks as if he might say something else, but starts to cough instead. The sound is wet and wretched, cracking off the walls of the garden and the stone infirmary building across the grass.

      “Are you all right?” Elfriede asks anxiously. “Shall I call the orderly?”

      He waves the idea away. The fit dies down, and he leans his head back against the chair. “It’s not as bad as it sounds. It’s gotten much better, believe it or not.”

      “You must have been at death’s door, then.”

      “Yes, I rather think I was. It’s a real indignity, to catch pneumonia in the summertime. My mother says it was all the dissipation.”

      “Dissipation? Really? You don’t seem like the dissipated sort.”

      “Well, my mother’s idea of dissipation is a glass of sherry in the evening. Her side of the family is all Scotch Presbyterians. Strict,” he adds, apparently realizing Elfriede isn’t well acquainted with the tenets of Scotch Presbyterianism. “Damned strict.”

      “So you were escaping.”

      “Something like that. I finished university a year ago and thought—well, one’s only got this single chance to sin, before that inevitable time of life when one’s sins puncture the happiness of somebody else.”

      “It’s not inevitable,” Elfriede says. “You don’t have to do it.”

      “Do what? Go home and take up the law and become a respectable chap?”

      “No. You should go back to Vienna instead. Go back to Vienna and the cafés and that girl of yours—”

      “Frau von Kleist,” he says solemnly, “you’re making me weary with all your talk of rebellion. I’m a sick man, remember?”

      “Of course.”

      “I require a long period of rest and recuperation, not a program of debauchery.”

      “How long—” She clears her throat and continues. “How long are you supposed to stay here?”

      “As long as it takes. A month or two, perhaps. Just in time for autumn. And you, Frau von Kleist? How long do you expect to stay?”

      She shrugs. “As long as it takes.”

      “A month or two, perhaps? I’m afraid I don’t know much about nervous disorders.”

      “More time than that, I think.”

      There is a queer, heavy silence, the kind for which the clinic is famous. The deep peace of the mountains settles over Elfriede, a sense of motionless isolation that sometimes unnerves her, or increases her melancholy, because it seems as if she’s the only human being in the world, and she wants passionately to belong to somebody, anybody, almost anybody. Elfriede smells the wildflowers, the faint odor of something cooking in the refectory kitchen—it’s nearly lunchtime—and something else as well, a peculiar, indecipherable scent she will come to recognize as that of Herr Thorpe himself, a scent that will forever remind her of mountains, even in the middle of a teeming, dirty city.

      Herr Thorpe murmurs, “There’s the orderly.”

      Elfriede glances to the infirmary door, and the white-uniformed man presently emerging from it. A shimmer of panic crosses her chest, the way you feel when the nurse arrives to draw your blood from your veins. She climbs to her feet atop the wall.

      “I must be going, Herr Thorpe—”

      “Wilfred.”

      “Wilfred.” She hesitates. “My name is Elfriede.”

      He presents her with that wide grin, one eye squinted. “Why, it’s practically the same as mine! What are the chances, do you think?”

      “Very slim, I think.”

      Wilfred puts his hand to his heart. “Shattered. Will I see you again?”

      She leaps back to the meadow side, which is about a half meter higher than the garden, rising upward along a soft, rounded hill. “I don’t see why we should. We occupy entirely different wings of the clinic.”

      “And yet you’re here.”

      “A mistake!” she says, over her shoulder, as she starts to climb the hill.

      Wilfred’s voice carries after her. “There are no mistakes, Elfriede the Fair! Only fate!”

      Elfriede climbs quickly, and the word fate is so thin and distant, it’s almost out of earshot. Nevertheless, she hears it. In fact, it echoes inside her head, over and over, in time to the heavy smack of her heart as she approaches the summit of the hill. She tells herself it’s only the effort of the climb, the thin air, the anticipation of the view from the top.

       LULU

       JULY 1941

       (The Bahamas)

      EVERY TOWN HAS its watering hole, where everybody gathers to share a few drinks and some human news, and in Nassau that particular place was the bar of the Prince George Hotel. You couldn’t miss it. If, newly disgorged from some steamship onto the hot, smoky docks of Nassau Harbor, you staggered with your suitcase across Bay Street to shelter from the sun, you found yourself bang under the awning of the Prince George. And since the Prince George, as a matter of tradition, offered the arriving tourist his first glass of rum punch gratis, why, you can see how the bar developed a loyal following. I should know, believe me, even though I’d arrived by air instead of by sea. That punch went down so well, I made straight for the reception desk and booked a room. Three weeks later, I had almost forgotten I’d lived anywhere else. Every evening at six sharp, I made my way downstairs and took up a stool three seats down from the left, and the bartender—we’ll call him Jack—whipped up a cocktail while I lit a cigarette from a case full of Parliaments, a brand relatively rare in New York City but nigh ubiquitous in this British Crown colony. So began my twentieth night in Nassau. Now pay attention.

      Jack was the kind of bartender who sized you up first and decided for himself what kind of drink you needed. On this particular evening, with the place just loosely occupied and the afternoon sun still filling the windows, he took a bit of time and asked, “Be a double for you, Mrs. Randolph? Look like you been dropping bombs all over Germany today.”

      “Nothing as exciting as that.” I rested my left hand on the thick, sleek varnish and stared at the gold band on my fourth finger. “Just a day with the ladies at the Red Cross.”

      Jack made a low, slow whistle. “Since when?”

      “Since this morning, when the nice fellow in charge of the magazine was so dear as to send me one of his telegrams to go with my breakfast.”

      “The good kind of telegram?”

      “See for yourself.” I set the cigarette in the ashtray, pulled the yellow envelope from my pocketbook, and removed the wisp of paper, which I spread out flat on the counter before me. How I hated the color yellow.

      HAPPY