“I once met this fellow in the south of France, this painter. Do you know what he called this time of day? The hour before sunset?”
“No.”
“The golden hour.” Wilfred waves his hand at the sun, which now burns just above the jagged peaks that form their horizon. “He said that’s when everything looks the most beautiful, just before the sun sets. This luminous air turning everything to gold. He said it made him want to paint the whole world. And then it’s gone, just like that. The sun disappears. The night arrives.”
“The golden hour.” Elfriede stares at Wilfred’s hair, which has indeed transformed into a gold so pure as to make the alchemists weep, like the sun itself. She wants to touch it, to bury her face in it, to lick the gold from each strand before it’s gone. Before Wilfred’s gone, and the night arrives.
“What about you, Elfriede?” he asks. “That’s the important thing. What will you do?”
“I don’t know. Except I can’t stay here any longer if you’re gone.”
“Can’t you?”
“No, it’s impossible. It will hurt too much.”
“Not so much as it hurts me to leave.”
“No, more. Because you’ll have Vienna, you’ll have new sights and scenes, nothing to remind you of me. Whereas here, these buildings, this mountain, this meadow—everything is you now. And it will be empty.”
“Is that so intolerable?”
“You know it is.”
“Hmm.” The fingertips make another waltz on her knuckles. A Blue Danube of longing. “I thought you needed approval from this doctor to leave. Are you certain you want to cross him?”
“He can’t stop me. I’ll find a way out, like you.”
Find a way out. Once she says the words, once she releases them into the air, they become possible. The horror of the outside world loses all consequence compared to the horror of existing inside the sanatorium without Wilfred. Against that, she has no other fear: not the mountain roads or the trains or the stares of strangers, not the husband she has disappointed, not the baby who doesn’t know her, not Herr Doktor Hermann and all his degrees and authority. She can leave. She is the wife of a baron, after all. She can arrange for a carriage, she can simply walk out the door if she wants. Who will dare to stop her?
Elfriede straightens her back. Her eyes are dry now, her blood’s warm. “Yes. I can’t stay here without you. I’ll leave.”
“Good,” says Wilfred. “That’s settled. But where will you go, my heart?”
She curls her fingers inside her palm, so that her entire hand disappears in the grass beneath Wilfred’s hand. Sometimes, sitting in this patch of meadow under the sun, smelling the warm, dead flowers, she forgets that anything else exists except the two of them, disappearing into the grass and each other.
Where will she go? She belongs to only one other place. Only one other heart beats inside her chest, whether she wants it there or not.
“Back to my son, maybe,” she says. “Maybe I’ll go back to my son and miss your freckles. All twenty-six of them.”
BUT NO SUCH AGONIZING DECISION needs to be made, after all. When Elfriede returns to the sanatorium—by a different path from Wilfred’s, of course—Herr Doktor Hermann waits for her in her room. He takes her hands.
“There is terrible news, Elfriede,” he tells her. “I’m afraid your husband is very sick. The family has summoned you home to his side.”
BY THE TIME the evening wound to its end, I’d lost track of all the names, all the faces. They passed in a blur while the duchess guided me around the garden, under the lanterns, introducing me like a prize filly, and I pranced and pawed and whinnied on cue, made almost dizzy by this extraordinary ascent of fortune. In the months to come, I didn’t remember the exact moment in which I first met Mrs. Gudewill and her daughters, or Fred Sigrist, or the other men and women who were to figure so prominently in this Bahamian chapter of my life. I didn’t remember the precise drip of information that fed its way through my ears and into my brain, to be picked through and examined later. I do remember that I stood once more in the duke’s study, speaking to Axel Wenner-Gren—yes, him, the Swedish industrialist, owner of Hog Island, the sort of fellow attracted to tax havens like the Bahamas like ants to picnics—when Thorpe reappeared. By now, most of the guests had left, and only a few of us remained to drink bourbon whiskey from the Windsor cabinet and listen to the duke’s collection of popular American songs on the phonograph. Mr. Wenner-Gren wanted to know more about my husband.
“How long were you married?” he asked.
“Only a year.”
“Then you were newlyweds. What a terrible thing, this war.”
“What’s the war got to do with it?”
“Oh, I beg your pardon. I assumed he was killed in battle.”
I tried to speak and realized the muscles of my throat were paralyzed, that my pulse struck like a hammer in my neck. The familiar panic. You never knew when it might seize you, when it might sock your gut at any sudden noise, any bang of a window, any innocent question. When it struck, you had to remember to breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth, to disguise your terror as something else, like grief. When the panic receded, when the muscles softened enough to enable you to speak at all, you spoke haltingly, as if mastering your anguish, so that no one would suspect you were lying.
“No,” I said. “He was killed in an accident. A terrible accident.”
Now, though he was all of sixty years old, this Wenner-Gren was still an attractive man, a man of silver hair and elegant movements and perceptive blue eyes of the X-ray variety, if you know what I mean. He smoked his cigarette and stared at me, not at all moved by my widowhood, while I resisted the urge to cross my arms over my chest and ask him if the rumors were true, that he was really a Nazi, that he was friends with Goering and that his real mission here in Nassau was to persuade the duke to cast his fortunes with a triumphant Germany. After all, wasn’t that exactly the kind of worldwide exclusive the Metropolitan had sent me to the Bahamas to discover? Wasn’t Axel Wenner-Gren exactly the kind of man with whom I’d been desperate to sidle myself into profitable intimacy?
He leaned his face toward mine. “This must be terribly lonely for you.”
“Oh, I keep myself busy. Not as busy as you do, of course, with your yacht and your lovely estate.”
“Ah. What do you know about my estate?”
“Isn’t it right there on Hog Island? I can just about see it from my bedroom window.”
“Can you, now?”
“And your yacht, of course. There’s no mistaking her.” I paused to sip my drink. “Where are you headed next? I hear you’re much enamored of Mexico these days. You’ve started a bank there, haven’t you? The Banco Continental.”