1

She dreamed of a translucent moon, round and up high in a china-blue sky and a yard full of blowing white wash in the wind. A reward, she acknowledged, awake, her toes now on top of her husband’s. A reward for some obscure metaphysical transaction well done.

Claire slipped out of bed and went down the old stairs, glancing at the ballroom-sized closet she’d spent the day before putting in order. She stood still at the bottom and surveyed the quiet floor. It would never look like this again, cleared of the children’s toys, smelling of the fruit she’d arranged in a bowl on the table and the Murphy’s Oil Soap she’d massaged to a glow in the wood. The still unsettled squall of dust she’d churned up in a frenzy lingered in the stained-glass air. There it was. The housekeeper’s tidy universe, infinite and miniature. She yawned and stretched.

Claire went into the kitchen and put the coffee water up to boil. She sat down on a stool by her lamp with the big tobacco-stained shade. If there was no morning sunshine in her kitchen, blotted out as it was by the canopy of evergreen, she at least had this core of orange warmth she’d invented for herself. Claire held on to that warmth for a moment, enjoying it before the others woke up, before the day would formally begin, before Isolde would arrive and take the joy out of all of it.

Isolde Donnerwetter would strew her expensive luggage all over the house and disapprove with a glance of all Claire’s fine efforts. She’d make that puzzled smalling of the eyes that imagined, boy, what I would have done with this place! With similar eyes, Claire noticed the piece of pottery on top of the baker’s rack. It really was a little too fussy. What she needed was a simple piece of pottery. Claire wrapped her old terry-cloth robe more snugly about her. It didn’t matter what Isolde thought. She wouldn’t let it.

They’d bought this house, Claire and Johnny had, expecting to stay for a short while and then move on, out to some more suitable neighborhood; only now, happy despite themselves, despite an overwhelming Third World immigration, even, in some cases, because of it, they lived very comfortably, thank you very much, in their plush and shady old house. There were benefits to hundred-year-old, ramshackle dwellings: front porches, back porches, cavernous cellars, and big, dusty attics for children to hide-and-go-seek in.

Claire had, at last, the enormous kitchen she’d always dreamed of and never would have been able to afford if they’d moved somewhere more appropriate. They had a great deal of property for the area, and without the drain of high taxes so many of their friends had to put up with. Friends who’d moved away to more idyllic, “safe” neighborhoods. To which they would certainly reply, “Right, but you’ve got to pay those killer private-school tuitions.” “You have to die from something,” Johnny would snort, and shrug. He liked to be near Brooklyn and she liked to be near the city, so it worked out all right. There were twenty-seven full-grown trees in their backyard. It was a good two lots, one opening onto Kew Gardens, the more highfalutin neighborhood with access to the woods, but a shortage of parking spaces, and the other resting in the dowdier but charming Richmond Hill, where you could park wherever you pleased on the roomy, potholed streets. What used to be a barn now served very well as a three-car garage. The broad, sloping hill in front of the house looked clear down to sleepy Myrtle Avenue. It would be quite something one day, when they got it fixed up and all that pachysandra pulled up and grass seeded in. It was as close as you could get to the country in the city. Already she had the backyard almost perfect. Claire padded softly over to the window and looked out. She leaned against the cold sill and watched a robin make his dour way through the snow-creased mud. Just give the grapevine another year or two and they could move the picnic table from under the pines. A nice bottle of that homemade red wine from Johnny’s Italian precinct sergeant and some fresh mozzarella from Suino d’Oro on Liberty Avenue, well, these were the pinnacles of any summer evening. Then she could have Johnny move that whatever it was, that old thingamajig statue off to the side. She would put in a pattern of climbing blue slate in a trail up the side of the steep, viney overgrowth. When she got hold of some nice old blue slate, she would.

Claire padded softly over to the window and looked out. She leaned against the cold sill and watched a robin make his dour way through snow-creased mud. It wouldn’t be long before spring was here, she shivered. Yes, she would clear away those shrubs. She would do it herself. She was good at that sort of thing, once she got her old jeans on and got going. Just yank the buggers out and before you knew it, they’d have their own prestigious entrance on Park Lane South. An arched trellis. With roses. Big, voluptuous, old fashioned, cream colored roses. And blue morning glory. The idea cheered her and she returned to the tasks at hand. There was a dishwasher Johnny had put in for her under the butcher-block board, but she hardly ever used it. How she had made fun of her mother for not using hers! Now she knew why she hadn’t. When you had your sink at the window and a fair, awakening yard to look out on, this squirrel and that, all these birds and the thick virgin wood out the back brimming over, it was almost a pleasure to wash dishes. Well, it was a pleasure, she revised her thought. As long as you’d shackled the garbage cans well the night before. Those raccoons could get pretty ingenious when they caught the scent of last night’s pistachio ice cream.

Claire washed herself under the cold-water tap while the coffee steeped. Plenty of elbow grease had gone into the gleaming gooseneck faucet. Hadn’t they all told her it was useless and she’d best throw it out! They had. And now look at it. The icy cold hurt her narrow wrists but she didn’t want to use the hot water and wake up the house, not yet. Let them sleep. Those pipes rocked and rolled like sneakers in the dryer when you gave them more than one job to do, and she didn’t really mind the invigorating torture. It was good for the heart, wasn’t it?

She crept up the ceremonial expanse of the stairway, with its disapproving urchins and gargoyles, letting her white fingers trail and linger along the wood. She stole past Johnny. There was only one massive, pelted arm of his to be seen, abandoned in sleep across the crumpled eiderdown. The air was particular with that foreign, tart man smell of him. Mine—she narrowed her eyes and acknowledged—all mine. She sucked it in and swept up her old green cozy turtleneck from the floor. There were underwear and warm socks that matched in a basket of clean rumpled laundry. On the way down, Claire looked in on the children. Their mouths were wide open. They were off in their dreams. Astonishing, she considered, how angelic those cutthroat blackguards appeared in their sleep.

Floozie the dog, never one much for mornings, barely lifted her head. She just thumped her snub tail in greeting as Claire hobbled past, struggling into a pair of ugly rubber boots conveniently left by the previous owner, a Mr. Kinkaid. Mr. Kinkaid was a cantankerous, widowed old gent who’d happily—no, gleefully—signed the whole shebang over to Claire and Johnny and moved to a warm attic apartment down the block.

Claire found her navy pea jacket downstairs on a peg. The phone rang and she grabbed the receiver.

“What are you doing up?” a thick, cigaretty voice accused. It was Jupiter Dodd, she knew right away, She She magazine publisher, cranky and fast making his belligerent rounds, waking up the world and giving them a good yell before they were guarded enough to stand up for themselves.

“I’m just going out,” she told him, cocking one ear toward upstairs, happy to hear from him. She was always happy to hear from Jupiter. He was her only source of income in a world with very little income nowadays. Of course, she could always finish off the basement and rent it out, but even that took money, and they didn’t have any.

“What’s up?” She tried not to sound like a fish on a hook.

“Any ideas for a shoot on Barbados?”

“Barbados?” Her heart leaped. She hadn’t been to Barbados in years. “Let me think.”

“You see, I knew you’d been there. I’m sending Hideoki with a half dozen Amazons. He’s never been, and neither has the stylist. I told them you’d been everywhere and would have an idea.”

“Oh,” she said, her mind racing to find something to say that wouldn’t let on her disappointment.

“It’s been such a long time,” she drawled. “What was the name of that place I used to stay? I’ll have to look through my old appointment books. Can I get back to you?”

“No, I’m going out. I’ll call you back this afternoon. Have you finished shooting those accessories I sent you?”

“Um, just about,” she lied.

“Good. And please don’t use that local stuff as background anymore. We’re sick to death up here of Queens railroad trestles done up to look like the banks of the Seine.”

“Right-o,” she chirped stupidly and they hung up. Claire held the door so it wouldn’t slam and made her way outside over the crackly drenched ice and mud. The sky was low and woolly behind the branches, and her breath came out in tight white puffs. There was a great show of padlock and husky chain on the garage door, but it wasn’t really latched and any easy push scraped it open. You only had to watch out for splinters. Claire blinked carefully in the startling darkness. There was a smell of rust and old rubbery things. She always checked for raccoons before she went in, not wanting to corner one off guard.

Along the wall her maroon Columbia bicycle waited for her. Her gallant steed. She wheeled it out with doting care, making sure it didn’t knock into the Chrysler Royale Johnny was restoring. Johnny was an undercover detective, but he really enjoyed working on what he called “masterpieces” like this. The bicycle he’d come across in a garbage heap in East New York on his way back from a drug bust. He’d thought she might like it. She’d seen it coming, limping up the driveway under his skeptical tutelage. She had loved it, immediately and effusively. Johnny was a little bit jealous of her bike, she suspected cheerfully, hopping on and wobbling away, kicking the door shut, straining not to lose control down the steep drive, setting the deep steel basket straight before she slipped the bulky mitt back into her pocket. Spring was here. She smiled at the tufts of crocus on everyone’s snow-puddled lawns. Or would be any minute.

Claire tooled down to Jessy’s candy store on Myrtle, now actually Mohammed’s Chapadi Emporium, but he still sold New Jersey milk and eggs and poppy-seed rolls and the Daily News, did Mohammed, so the early-morning regulars continued to gather there, and they still called it Jessy’s, never mind it reverberated curry and there was a rainbow curtain of ladies’ punjabis along the wall. Mohammed put on “News Radio” for them till nine o’clock, when he’d go back to “Bangladesh Top Twenty Hits.” Then the sleepy Indian housewives would begin to tiptoe in.

“Good morning, Mrs. Claire.” He displayed a set of enormously healthy-looking white teeth and gave a half-bow. Claire smiled tentatively back. Mohammed refused to believe Claire was not some wealthy heiress. “Such an important house, on top of the entire Richmond Hill,” he would cluck admiringly, shaking his head.

“Mohammed,” she’d admonish him, piling items into her ecologically correct net bag, “I am just another mortgage-impoverished Queens housewife and you only badger me to make me feel good, don’t you?”

“Yes, ’tis true,” he’d say, wobbling his head and holding the door open for her, “but you have visited my country, have you not?” He liked to remind her of this as she pedaled away, as if that made her the same just-flown-in from Delhi apparition in her freshly ironed and nevertheless wrinkled linen jacket. As indeed she once had been. Once. She sighed and carried on contentedly and pedaled up the potholed street, passing crazy Lydia Schuler as she bumped along. Lydia Schuler was harmless, just another burned-out, zigzagging pedestrian of Richmond Hill. Claire hardly looked as Lydia, nearing fifty, banged her head against the graffitied mailbox on the corner. Claire checked her watch. A quarter to seven. She had a couple of spare minutes before the family started to wake up. She’d stop off and bring a roll to Iris von Lillienfeld. She leaned her bike against the bent sycamore and went lightly up the steps of Iris’s magnificently intact antebellum. It would take her a long time and a lot of grief to get over not having this old lady around to talk to. Originally a gruff enigma, Iris had become her blithe, if elderly, mentor.

Claire, charmed with her own thoughtfulness, rattled on Iris’s relic-of-a-sea-horse knob. It lay sideways, and you had to turn it like the key in a music box.

Iris, meanwhile, stood with weary eyes, wispy sprigs of pale chin whiskers fluttering in the draft and a digestion gone merrily berserk. She stood behind the expanse of the refrigerator. Perhaps, if she stood very still, Claire would go away. She should come back later. Claire always did, no fear of that. You’d think she’d have the decency not to be so good so early.

“Iris!” Claire’s imperious whisper carried through both helpless doors.

“Fool!” Iris groaned. She would wake the cat. He was so old, though, Lü the Wanderer was, one wondered if he heard anything at all at this point, or just read lips. He had to be twenty-seven, or twenty eight. Iris was afraid to wake him up and at the same time she was afraid not to. One day she would shake him and he would be cold and stiff. She didn’t want to deal with that. She supposed it would be better, though, than him finding her cold and stiff. Who would look after the old fellow? Who would care that his teeth were very bad and he could only manage tapioca and the like? Iris moved with a decisive lurch out into clear view. Better Claire than the ASPCA.

“Ah. There you are! I was just about to worry.”

Iris unlatched the inside door and let her in.

“I didn’t hear the clock.”

“You mean the bell.” Iris was always mixing up common words. Iris moved away in case there was a lingering trace of booze about herself from the night before. Claire would get all worked up and sermonize. Little did she know that Claire had her own silent soldier of Bordeaux dying fast in the back of the crockery cupboard, justified primly by Tilset- and Appenzeller-loving veins and arteries that nowadays, thank God, the experts admitted, required such slosh.

“I’ve brought you a nice fresh roll,” she said. She waited. Iris did not smile but turned her back and retreated past the grand piano to her bedroom. Perhaps she was not well? Claire hesitated. Iris came back out, her teeth installed, and rewarded Claire with a filmy grin.

“You’re out early,” she growled in her still thick German accent.

“I’ve got that friend of mine coming from Munich today,” Claire reminded her, remembering herself. Her heart sank.

They shared an intimate grimace. Iris knew that Claire had had a whole other life over there in Munich and didn’t much like dredging it up again. Well, she liked it but hated it at the same time. It was complicated. Iris understood because she’d lived other lives over there as well. You didn’t switch entire continents when things were going hunkydory. It was all right, though. It would be all right.

“Better you than me,” Iris said, referring to Claire’s company. Or any company, for that matter. Her own letter from Germany lay propped against the Tiffany lamp, along with bill receipts and unopened Hanukkah cards. She batted her eyes, struggling with fatigue. All night long she’d walked around the empty house, awake. She might as well not even go to bed till dawn, for all the good it did her. She didn’t get a wink till then anyway. Iris nudged Claire out of the way and went to the sink to fill the kettle. Claire stood there indecisively. “Well,” she said, “I suppose I’ll head on home and get my crew up and at ’em.”

“So soon?” Iris pouted insincerely.

“Tell you what … I’ll stop back later. It will give me an excuse to get away. Just in case Isolde drives me nuts. Which she will.”

Iris looked, from behind, like a kimonoed model for an art nouveau stained-glass window. Her waist-length hair had been rolled up for so many decades into the same Oriental chignon that by now it went that way itself, without any comb or barrette. Iris was a noblewoman, not only in character but by birth, and there weren’t many whom she let get close. In fact, none. There was the grocery delivery boy, the liquor-store delivery boy, and then there was Claire. And Claire was so busy with her own life that she didn’t notice how empty anyone else’s was, especially not the life of someone whose face she was so delighted to behold. Iris always remained mysterious and dignified, even the more she got to know her. A Libra woman.

“Don’t worry so much,” Iris advised her as she left. “She will either love it or she will hate it. It’s already decided by her mood. I know my Germans.”

“Yes.” Claire stopped halfway down the back steps, remembering Iris’s vague confidences of Nazi persecution and her narrow escape from Bavaria. “I suppose you do.” But she knew her Germans too, Claire did. She hadn’t lived in Munich ten years herself without learning something of the “new” German. As far as that went, if the sun was shining, Isolde would be in a splendid state of mind, and if it was raining, she would be picky and nasty and fault-finding. Which was why you were always better off dealing with an on-vacation German than a German at home. Or maybe that was racist and ridiculous, and Claire held her breath in a sudden and absolute state of confusion. It was too soon. She never should have told Isolde she should come. The thought of the state of her cellar! Ah, well. She remembered the window boxes Johnny had made for her and painted forest-green. Really, one couldn’t help being impressed with those. Anyone who had half a shred of imagination could see just what she intended there. Feeling better, she gave Iris von Lillienfeld a wave and pedaled home. This was good. This was lovely. She pedaled faster. At this rate, her stomach would be flat in time for bathing-suit season. For once.

She watched her house come into view with the same mixture of astonished pride and shame she’d feel running into her son when he was filthy and in dire need of a haircut. There was an awful lot of rusty tricycles, bedraggled doll’s houses, and balls and bats scattered across the driveway. She’d have to get them to clear the place. Promise them an excursion to Bishop’s Comic Book and Baseball Card Store to juice them up. First impressions were so important, and no one was more fastidiously clean than Isolde. Hadn’t she taught Claire to scrub the bathroom tile behind the faucet with a recycled toothbrush and bleaching powder? Stood behind her, hands on her hips, until she’d got it right? Who’d been coming to visit, Claire’s own boyfriend? Claire jumped off the bike and took the steep hill by foot. “San Francisco in your own front yard,” Johnny liked to say. The phone was ringing as she came in the back door, and she covered the kitchen floor in two long strides to get to it.

“Claire? Oh, good. I wasn’t sure what time it was there.”

“Isolde? My God. What time is it? Have you landed already?”

“Darling, I never took off.”

“Wait, what? You’re still at Munich Airport?” This wasn’t bad. Now she’d have another whole afternoon to snazz up the basement, not just ram things into clandestine piles in overloaded cupboards.

“No, you don’t understand. I’m home. I’m still home! I’m not coming after all.”

“What?”

“Oh, Claire, don’t sound like that. Your voice so forlorn.”

“What do you mean, you’re not coming? I bought new sheets and curtains for the guest room. You’ve got to come!”

Isolde’s husky, whisky voice laughed long and hard. Then, “Claire,” she whispered, becoming intimate, “I can’t come down because so much has happened, and—I hope you’re sitting down—I’m getting married.”

“Married?”

“Tch. You don’t have to sound so astonished. Yes, married.”

“What? But how—”

“I know”—Isolde yawned across the broad Atlantic—“it’s all still new to me, too.”

“When, today?”

“Of course not today. He only just asked me. May seventeenth.”

Claire looked frantically around her bright, cold kitchen. The door, unlatched, swung open in the wind. “Who? Who asked you? Wolfgang?”

“Wolfgang? Don’t be silly. Who would want to marry Wolfgang? It’s Blacky. I’m marrying your old kumquat, Blacky.”

“What!”

“Oh, please stop shouting ‘What’ like that.”

“You can’t,” Claire whispered.

“I bloody well can.”

“Isolde, have you gone absolutely mad?”

“Yes, I suppose I have.”

“What will become of you?”

They both said nothing, mulling together what would indeed become of her. Both saw, as if by magic, the same evening sunlit picture of an Isolde older still, sitting on an orange-and-white chair beneath a chestnut tree in a busy beer garden, holding her head of great dark hair in her hands, bemoaning her absurd, romantic destiny.

“Well, anyway,” Isolde said finally, “I’ll have my crow’s feet done for nothing from now on.”

Blacky, Doktor von Osterwald, was the busiest plastic surgeon in Munich. And this was a rather pointless, silly thing for Isolde to say because she had never paid Blacky once, and he’d had a hand in that stunning face many times already. For years. Even when he and Claire had been together. Claire remembered: Blacky had always been bringing them together. Claire had never worried because Isolde had been a good—what was it?—six or seven years older than she, automatically eliminating her from what Claire considered the “running.” Now, of course, Claire was older than Isolde had been then. And that put a different slant on things. Claire knew now, for instance, that eye contact, more than any dewy youthfulness, had to do with sexual attraction, and she wondered what the two of them had been up to years ago, while she’d been off on an unsuspecting shoot in Vientiane or Villengilly.

“I don’t suppose you love him,” Claire heard herself say.

“Love?” Isolde snorted derisively, characteristically. “Certainly not.”

So Claire knew, then, all at once, that Isolde not only loved him but was hopelessly, crazily in love with him. “That’s all right then.” She tried to sound chummy. It wouldn’t do to let Isolde know she knew. Poor thing. “I can’t believe you’re not coming, though,” she said, meaning it, suddenly seeing the days and the weeks before her free. Nothing in front of her but seeing the children off in the morning and doing the marketing and being there for them when they came back. And laundry, lots of laundry. Johnny coming and going. No real Johnny to look at and talk to, really talk with. Those days were over, she sighed, unhappy at last, wishing that Isolde still were coming and she could show off her brilliant sense of color and Gemütlichkeit, coziness, for hadn’t she learned all that from Isolde? Hadn’t it been Isolde’s sneer in her ear she’d used in deciding whether or not to buy this or choose that? Yes, she admitted now, for she had no reason not to, it had.

“Of course you’ll come,” Isolde said.

Claire laughed. “I wish.”

“What, of course you must. You’ll stand up for me.”

Claire started to whimper. No tears would come. They never did anymore. Her face crunched into a grimace of misery and a catlike sound eked out.

“What’s that? What are you doing, blubbering?”

“I’m not, it’s just—so happy for you, Isolde. For you both.”

“Sure you are. Tell me, has that moron you married figured out how to steal some money yet? Oh, please, don’t answer, don’t defend him. I can’t bear it.”

“Isolde, please. Don’t.”

“All right. But only because I know you’ll hang up on me if I go on, and I don’t feel like redialing that dreadful, boring number. So what can I do? Send you the ticket? I will, you know.” And for a moment Claire feared there was nobody else, no one to stand up for Isolde in her moment of—whatever it was she was going to accomplish—but how silly. Isolde, Munich’s own party girl extraordinaire. Even if she went they’d hardly see her for the throng.

“I know you would, Isolde. I couldn’t, though. You know that.”

“Ach. Scheisse! The doorbell! I’ve got to go. It’s that fool Wolfgang. I’ll call back tomorrow.” She hung up the phone. The mournful, empty ring of a gone connection sang from Claire’s still trembling hand.

“What’s the matter, Mommy?” Anthony stood in the doorway, pajamaed and rubbing one eye with a fist. “Is it the dryer broken again?”

And outside the house, where Claire had been so sure that spring was on its gentle way, great white flakes came down in a hurry, the way they will do when they cover the house and intend, absolutely, to stay.

Breakfast started off well, pancakes and bacon and nectarines, the cozy excitement of a good fast snowstorm, not fast enough to shut down school, though, and Claire was left with a muddy, sticky floor and a pile of dishes in the sink. She sat, legs crossed, rocking one foot up and down while she finished reading the News. Floozie the dog kept her company. Something lovely was on the radio. Brahms, she supposed. She pushed the paper away and frowned, grappling with an ornery cuticle. She didn’t know how she had supposed she could have provided a charming household for Isolde. Just look at this place. She sighed, the dog sighed, and she got up and put her warm pea coat on and her worn, but still very nice, navy-blue beret. The door banged shut and left the house the way it was in there, quiet and full of things and on its own. Her bike was in the yard. Luckily she’d propped it against the house, underneath the porch awning, and it was still dry. Floozie, never one to stay home once she was up, deposited a steaming yellow piddle in the snow and hopped up onto the scarf in the handlebar basket and they were off.

It was good packing snow, not slippery, and they tooled along, philosophically accepting their pelting of teeny doilies in the mouth, in the eyes, looking up at the tops of the heavy trees and watching as, little by little, the closed knots of buds were obliterated with white. A remarkable morning. And, yes, better that Isolde hadn’t come. Claire pedaled down to Jamaica Avenue, but the five-and-ten wasn’t open yet. She pedaled back; it was slower going this time. She decided to make a nice visit to church, noticed there was a Mass going on and so thought better of it. She hated to think how that early-morning crew would make shocked faces at her bicycle. She didn’t know why. God wouldn’t mind her bicycle at all, but never mind, she wouldn’t go, she would do a good deed and stop in at Iris’s. Cheer her up. She wheeled her bike brazenly into Iris’s garage, transported Floozie up the steps, and wound the bell. There was a little forest of potted plants on the porch, looking very dear and Swiss and chilly. When Iris didn’t come, Claire rattled the door finally and there she was, aggravated from the look of her and—Claire took a quick step backward—drunk from the blue, ginny reek of her. “Jesus,” Claire said.

“Well, come in anyway,” Iris said.

“No, I’m sorry I disturbed you, I—Iris! What the hell are you doing? Drinking at ten o’clock in the morning?”

Iris looked her up and down with a frayed, sad sneer, then turned her back and swayed unsteadily across the room. It was filled to the brim with antique tables and chairs and worn Turkey carpets and blown ruby glass and paintings in golden frames. There was the substantial coat of dust old people’s houses have. Iris lowered herself to the edge of a tapestry wing chair and then fell, phlump, back against the cushions. She laughed.

“Whoa there, Nellie.” Claire tried the seat across from her.

“I’m not so drunk,” Iris complained. “I was for an hour or so, but now”—her eyes slid shut—“I’m just ready for a nap.”

Claire watched her for a moment, reached across and patted her hand, then stood to go.

“You don’t have to leave just yet,” Iris murmured.

“Well, then I won’t.” Claire sat back down. She pulled a well-worn bisque baby doll from underneath her butt and got comfortable. “There’s no one waiting for me at home till three o’clock anyway,” she admitted. “And”—she shrugged—“Isolde won’t be coming after all.”

Iris’s eyes clicked open. “What’s that?”

“Yeah, and you won’t believe why. She’s getting”—she cleared her throat—“married.”

“Married?”

“Yes. And do you know who it is she’s marrying? My old boyfriend, that’s who. The doctor.” As this didn’t seem to impress Iris too much, she added, “The one with all the money.”

“Ah.”

“I mean, they invited me to come. Well, she did. Isolde wants me to be her matron of honor. Of course I said no.”

“Of course.”

“I couldn’t leave my family.”

“Of course not.”

“I’m so glad to be back in America anyway. Who wants to go there again, for God’s sake?”

“Not me, that’s for sure. You wouldn’t get me back to Munich,” Iris agreed, shivering. “Not for five million bucks.”

“Ha. Five million bucks, I’d go.”

“Not me.” Iris shook her fragile head vehemently. She reached over to the nearby keys of the baby grand but flinched at the awful stiffness of her fingers. “Not again, not ever. And I’ve got reason to go, let me tell you.”

Claire, past propriety, narrowed her eyes. “So tell me.”

Iris glowered at the wet dog on Claire’s lap but didn’t answer.

“Come on”—Claire swept the back of her hand through the air—“don’t you hold out on me.”

Iris regarded her with limpid, froggy eyes. “What were we talking about?”

“About not going back to Germany and why you would have reason to after all.”

“Oh, ja, I’ve got plenty of reasons. Hundreds of thousands of reasons.” She snickered faintly.

Claire leaned forward hopefully. “You mean family? You still have family over there?”

“You know that I don’t,” Iris rasped, disgusted. “You know Hitler took them all from me before I had a chance, before I—” She stopped suddenly, and Claire didn’t want to press her. The haunted look she’d seen come screaming from Iris’s eyes came out of somewhere deep and derelict inside. Claire didn’t want Iris to go back there. Not even to remember. Not even for a minute.

“You want me to let Lü out?” Claire nicked her head in the direction of the dining room, where the Siamese stood atop the burled walnut sideboard, a myopic and displeased old veteran on four rickety, but deft, bowlegs.

Iris came back. “Ja,” she murmured sadly, “you let him out and I’ll get us something to eat.”

“Good,” said Claire, always ready, at any time, any place, to eat.

Claire warmed up nicely with a lot of oatmeal cookies and a fancy little lady’s china cup of steaming chocolate. The windows, never clean, steamed over and rushed with the falling snow.

“More shoki?” Iris held the porcelain rose pot above Claire’s head.

“I wouldn’t mind another cookie.”

“That you never say no to. Eh? Was?” She bent down, grabbed Claire’s unsuspecting belly in her surprisingly strong hand and shook it heartily back and forth.

“Hey, knock it off!” Claire gave an embarrassed laugh and caught the affronted, capsized dog with one hand.

Iris, always resilient, was recovered enough now to indulge in reminiscence. It was her Uncle Oswald, she confided, who’d managed her escape from Diessen, a town in Bavaria. Her entire family was taken prisoner, and she would have been taken as well, but for a clandestine rendezvous with her girlfriends, Effi and Ursula. Effi was a common girl who’d been inadvertently responsible for saving her life by keeping her out late on a group date with a pair of shockingly drunken and irresponsible SA officers (that was one step below SS). The young Iris had been furious with her. She had sworn never to speak to her again and, as it happened, never would have, except Iris was to come home to an empty house rather than the furious father she’d expected. There had been no father there, no mother, no brother, no seven-year-old redheaded sister, wild for boy’s games and soccer and marzipan and—ach!—Iris stopped for a moment while she mopped her cheeks.

They were all gone. Gone. The windows of the summer house had been left open, the way her mother always kept it for a good long while after supper. The smells of cooking should be swept away by the clean Bavarian wind. It was such a pretty cottage, Iris remembered. White stucco, with brown shutters and window boxes filled with red geraniums, and a low, overhanging brown roof. There was a wind that night. The curtains stretched in fluttering sheets across the polished rooms as the astonished Iris stood there gaping. No one was there to shut them now, no one to click their tongues and shush the little one off to bed, to shut away the cold, chill night. Uncaring, cold-hearted endless night.

“Iris?” Claire whispered, but she didn’t hear her. Iris stood in the doorway of years ago, her useless key in one hand and her open purse in the other. A terrible rattling stole her back from confusion and shock to her Uncle Oswald’s distorted face behind the parlor window. He was grimacing, signaling to her. “Komm! Mach schnell! Komm!”

He walked her hurriedly down the backway paths of the Ammersee, the lakeside, where nobody went at night. They stole furtively past the boathouse, where the old man slept with his crisp light on, past the garden house of shut-tight sun umbrellas and chaise longues on white wooden wheels. Teeth chattering, without even a small bag of overnight things, because Uncle Oswald had insisted, “Es wird ja zu gefährlich,” it would be too dangerous. They went first to his own cottage past the gazebo. She stood waiting for him, her arms at her sides as he fumbled through cleansers and pails and washrags under the kitchen sink. In a shoe box, scrawled with the word Gift,—“Poison,” he found a tin of saddle soap wrapped in a muslin rag. He rammed this into his pocket, left everything as it was on the floor and raced, frantic, from the house.

She stumbled behind him, not believing, not wanting to believe the terrible nightmare that for her and so many others had now begun.

Claire moved uncomfortably in her chair. She didn’t want to hear this, but she didn’t want Iris to stop talking either. She tried not to show the shock on her face. She sat very still and breathed out and waited. Eventually, Iris caught hold of her voice and went on.

“He had come, my uncle, for the dessert. My mother, she made the most scrumptious desserts, shooing the cook from the kitchen and doing it all by herself. Oh, she was very vain about her pastry. Didn’t want anyone else to get the credit. She was something, my mother. She was Jewish. Well, you know that. My father, he married beneath his station, as they say, but he knew, we all knew, especially my mother’s family—they considered the marriage a step down for her—that no one was as good, as radiant with goodness, as my mother. He loved her so much. So much.” Here Iris stopped and glanced at Claire. “Your mama always reminded me of mine. The same type. Capable. The same”—she hesitated—“grace and serenity. So. She would make these special desserts for my uncle and then he and my father would take their Bummel, their stroll around the lake. That was a special day. It was my mother’s birthday. My father had presented her with her dearest wish, a Japanese maple tree. A dwarf. Sehr teuer! Very costly. We had a great ceremony planting it; my uncle was the shoveler. Ach, Ammersee was a beautiful place. Beautiful. Full of moonlight and the smell of Johannisbeere, black currant blossoms. It’s a peculiar smell, that, like ammonia and sweet hay. Unusual. There was no moon that night. You could not see the Zwiebelkopf, the onion dome, on the Marian Münster, the Minster, down the lane. And so we walked and walked. I thought he was taking me to somewhere special. To a destination. It was years later I realized he might have had no idea where it was he was leading me. He had come just in time to see the SS take the family away. He’d shut himself up inside the tool shed and watched as they shoved and pushed my gentle family into their car. Meine kleine Schwester! Just a little Fräulein in white socks around the ankles, slipping always into her shoes.

“Then my uncle had stayed for me, praying no one had been left behind to wait for me. No one had been, of course. Why bother? They knew I would go to the Polizei in Diessen, in the village, to find out what had happened. And they could arrest me then. We were, you see, a law-abiding family.

“My uncle and I, we walked all night. All night. My uncle had brought with him the shovel. From planting the Japanese maple tree. It had been lying still on the ground, and he’d picked it up and carried it. He led me, stupefied, to the outskirts of Munich. There was a Lastwagen, a truck, stopped on the side of the road. My uncle spoke with the driver. He offered to give him the shovel. He whispered. The driver didn’t want to take us. Then my uncle started to act very strangely, poking at the man with his elbow. Winking. I was naive, but I knew what he was doing. He wanted the man to believe I was his schatzi, his girlfriend. My uncle, remember, was an old man. “But”—Iris shrugged meaningfully—“so was the truck driver. Finally, winking and snickering back, he let us come with him to Munich. And he took the shovel. He had it the whole time he drove, banging between his legs. He was pleased with that shovel. He drove a long time on country roads. I remember we passed Nymphenburg. We passed the palace. You could see the glint of gold everywhere in the very dark and the folded white wings of the swans, like small boats, gliding down and then up the canals.

“At last, my uncle told the man to stop. We must get out. It was not yet dawn, but already the light climbed in the distance. My uncle jumped from the door of the truck, but he was no longer young enough to move so suddenly so quickly. He was stiff, and he hurt himself as he landed. His hip. He pretended he had not, but I knew he had. He tried not to grimace because he thought I wouldn’t let him continue if I knew he was in pain. I knew. But I let us conspire together to save my young life.

“We came to a village along the banks of the Isar. It was called Saint Hildegard’s. Named for Saint Hildegard of Bingen.”

“Saint Hildegard’s!” Claire cried out. “I know Saint Hildegard’s!” It was the charming inn and beer garden where all the “right” artsy people met and drank and argued and gossiped. Everyone knew Saint Hildegard’s Mill. Not everyone could afford to go there, though. And if you weren’t their sort, they conveniently forgot you and let you sit there stewing till you vowed never to set foot in the place again—which was just what they intended. Artists were always tolerated, though, and according to how promising they were, encouraged to loll about as long as they liked, signing their bills rather than paying cash. As a result, the walls were hung with beautiful, unusual paintings. The house was notoriously affable to taking payment in work rather than elusive cash.

“I remember the way it looked,” Iris continued, too absorbed to notice Claire’s excitement, “so quaint and misty in the dawn. A grassy meadow and a small, steep hill with a chapel, like a bell on the meadow. It was such a pretty place. My uncle knew somebody there. Or of someone. A man he could trust. We stopped. He gave this man at the Mühle, the Mill, he gave him Geld. Well, not money; stones—diamonds. At least one diamond he gave that man. I saw him take it out first from the boot-polish container. He turned to me as he took it out, as if no one, even God, should see what he had there. I saw the glitter of all the stones. Sixty stones. All blue-white and clear. ‘Irislein,’ he said to me, he always called me Irislein—his pet name for me—’your future.’

“He nodded to make sure I understood, and I nodded back. He told me this would keep me safe until he could come back for me. I should sew the stones into my clothes to keep them, when I could. And so he put me to wait beside a great tree on the hill. I sat there, cold with terror, but with joy and relief, too, for already I had learned, during that long, dark night, to cling to my survival. Even already I knew, with that cold box warming on my breast, that no matter what happened to my family—my mother, my father, all of them—I was prepared to go through anything, do anything, to live. I remember I cupped my bleeding feet inside my hands to comfort them. I saw the churning mill water under the lifting mist. The grass was sharp and short. A bird cried out from the chapel roof, and let me tell you, I wanted to live.”

Claire held her breath, and Iris rocked quickly back and forth. There was no sound but the clock. Claire thought perhaps Iris meant her to go, but she wasn’t sure. She stayed sitting there. Finally Iris continued. “My uncle left me there a long, long time. I put my head down on the ground. Perhaps I slept. I don’t remember. I remember looking up and seeing my uncle coming toward me with a very big, a huge, Bavarian man. Adam. Adam von Grünwald. You could always tell what was a Bavarian. They are dark and round and compact. This fellow, though, he was massive. He looked at me on the ground like that, and”—Iris’s eyes filled with tears—“he felt so sorry for me. He picked me up like I was a run-over animal. He carried me back to the Mühle, it was also a Gaststube, an inn, for artists mostly, and he put me upstairs. It was his mother’s room. He put me in her bed, and he had this great big hand, and he”—Iris touched her withered cheek—“he stroked me softly with this big hand and looked into my eyes with his shrewd black eyes and he said something in Bayerish—Bavarian. Who understood that dialect, gentry Berliner that I was? But whatever it was, I understood him and I felt safe, and I slept. He saved my life.”

“And what happened to him?”

Iris sighed.

Claire leaned forward. “He took the diamonds, right?”

“He? He didn’t take the diamonds. He hid them. He hid them good, too. For me, right there at Saint Hildegard’s Mühle.

“He and I, we were lovers. He was, you see, the great love of my life.” Iris smiled kindly at Claire. “Yes, even this old, ugly woman once was beautiful enough to be loved.” One gnarled, arthritic finger flicked a years-gone-by-and-vanished pin curl from her livered eye. “You sit there young and feel immortal, Claire. I tell you I was once immortal too. And now, I live in time.” She tossed her head. “We always thought we would go back together, get back there. It never occurred to us that we wouldn’t. I never saw my Uncle Oswald again. They intercepted him that next day returning from Munich to Diessen. He died in Dachau. But then everything started to happen. The whole world turned, somehow, upside down. There was no going back. There never will be. I should have sewn the stones into the lining of my clothes, as my uncle instructed me to do. But I didn’t. I left them, nice and safe there, hidden.”

“What? But, you mean it’s all still there?”

“Yup. But I wouldn’t go. I couldn’t.”

“But, you mean you’re really sure they’re still there?”

“He told me he would hide them there for me. Keep them. They would never leave the Mill until I came back for them. He swore this.”

“You believed him?”

“Oh, I believe it still.”

Claire remembered the opulent green of the Mill in the spring. A green as green as a Tunisian sky was blue. Wouldn’t Jupiter Dodd just love it as a background? She could even—her heart grew strong within her chest—use the dashing girls from Isolde’s wedding party. “I could,” she said out loud, “I could go.”

Iris lit a small cigar. A Davidoff. “I’d give you half,” she said. She puffed a fancy, contemplative cloud around her head. “Well. A third.”