CHAPTER 16

Mamah and Frank were exhausted by their train ride from Paris. They slowly pushed their way out of the station into Berlin’s pallid light. “Eine Gepackdroscke bitte,” Mamah said to the porter, who secured a luggage taxi and squeezed their six bags into it, plus the large portfolio Frank had kept at his side throughout most of the trip. Now, as the car moved along Unter den Linden and passed through the Brandenburg Gate, the driver pointed out their hotel in the distance, standing like a fortress guarding the grand boulevard.

Frank had been vague about their accommodations until the moment they climbed into the taxi. It was then that he announced, “The Hotel Adlon.” Mysterious, Frank was. How he loved to gift-wrap a moment. “It’s new” was all he would say. She liked it that way—the not knowing, the little surprises.

The Adlon, all 250 rooms of it, was as regal as a Bavarian palace. When they stepped out of the car, they were swept along by porters in gold epaulets who spoke English for their benefit. She felt rumpled after a day of train travel, but Frank escorted her into the lobby as if they were visiting royalty.

Mamah had never witnessed such opulence. While Frank registered, her eyes followed red carpeting up the central marble staircase to the gallery above, where plaster goddesses mounted on medallions smiled down on them. No bells sounded, but a system of lights twinkled at the porters’ station. Pages swished quietly past the skirts and luggage of new arrivals. Clutches of men and women sat smoking on green mohair banquettes, chatting in Italian, French, and Russian.

Mamah’s eye was caught by an exotic figure sitting across from where she stood. The woman was young and beautiful, with wavy black hair and olive skin. She wore a gown draped with filmy red and yellow scarves, and she was speaking soothing Spanish to a parrot on her shoulder. No one stared at the woman the way people would back home, where she’d have been as freakish as the dog-faced girl at the dime museum on State Street. Here she was just a small figure in a big tapestry.

“The whole place was designed by Herr Adlon,” the young porter said as he escorted them to the elevator. “Everything, even the face towels. Even this,” he said, touching the soutache swirls on his cuff. “He cares about all the little details.”

“A man of character,” Frank said.

On the third floor, the porter opened the door to their suite. Mamah walked in first and drew a quick breath at the gilded furniture and floor-to-ceiling Palladian windows.

Frank followed her in and looked around. “Headquarters!” He grinned, his eyes glinting with merriment.

The porter led them through the rooms, demonstrating water faucets and curtain pulls. The bed was massive, with a carved headboard and footboard. At the end of it, the boy set up a suitcase stand.

“Will you open the windows?” Frank asked. The young man obliged. Cold air and traffic sounds drifted into the bedroom.

Frank palmed the porter a tip. Once he was out the door, Frank bent over and held his sides, his eyes tearing up from laughter. “Good Lord, the gold leaf alone.”

“It’s a little bit much,” Mamah said, “but I like it.” She went to wash up, and when she returned to the sitting room, she found Frank rearranging the furniture. He had already moved several chairs and a small ormolu table over to the window.

“What are you doing?”

“Making this place habitable.”

She watched, amused, as he climbed up on the back of a sofa and took down a large portrait of a full-skirted lady in a white wig.

“Adieu, Marie Antoinette. Off with your head.” He lugged the painting out into the hallway, where he leaned it against the wall. Two more pictures in carved gold frames followed the first. Frank folded his arms, studying the curtains.

“You wouldn’t,” she whispered as he walked over and fingered the heavy velvet.

“Oh, I would if I could. It’s so damn dark in here. But they’re attached too high to take them down.”

He climbed up on a brocade fauteuil. Heaving an armful of fabric, he tied each panel so the curtains ended in knots five feet off the floor. “Would you hand me my walking stick, my dear?”

Mamah retrieved it from a corner and passed it up to him. She was laughing now, too.

Frank took the stick, placed it beneath one knot, and lobbed the balled material up onto the boxy top of the valance above the window.

“Bravo!” she shouted.

Frank repeated the stick trick with the other curtain. Still standing on the chair, backlit by sunlight, he eyed the crystal chandelier that hung over the center of the sitting room.

“Don’t do it!” She laughed. “You’ll kill yourself. Then you’ll have a spiritual adventure, all right.”

Frank climbed down from the chair. “I’m not finished yet,” he said. He pulled the heavy sofa away from the wall and moved it over so that it faced the window. They collapsed onto it together and watched the city light up as evening fell.

“Welcome home, Mamah.” He put an arm around her. “Such as it is.”

         

IN THE MORNING she lay quietly beside his sleeping body. She loved the soap smell of him; the full lower lip perfectly still; the immaculate fingernails trimmed to crescents. She felt safe with him here, as she had on the boat.

They walked the streets together that first full day in Berlin. They had no map, no agenda. Frank said he preferred to simply bump into things. Yet when they found themselves in front of an art gallery on the Kurfürstendamm, Mamah suspected he had conspired from the start to lead her there. Inside, they found wonderful woodblock prints for sale.

Frank was taken with a picture showing a man on horseback riding through a dense stand of trees. “Waldritt,” he murmured, reading the penciled title. “What does that mean?”

“Forest ride,” she said. The horseman was lit with a beam of ocher-inked sunlight as he came into a clearing. “This figure is probably a knight seeking the Holy Grail,” she said after she’d translated the few lines of text next to the print.

“Well, then, I guess that settles it,” Frank said. He wore a sheepish grin as he paid for it.

         

THE NEXT DAY, he left early for his first meeting with Wasmuth.

“It’ll be a full day today,” he called to her as he headed out the door. “Go have some fun for yourself.”

Mamah suppressed the impulse to get out on the street. She spent time unpacking instead, placing the few garments she’d brought in perfect little piles. She wanted to start things right.

She pulled a plain wool dress from the wardrobe and put on a pair of sensible walking shoes. At noon she went down in the elevator and was seated in the dining room.

“May I recommend the bouillabaisse?” the waiter asked when he came to her table. “You won’t find it anywhere else in Berlin.”

Mamah hesitated. “Bouillabaisse?”

“A seafood soup our chef invented for the kaiser.” The waiter bent down as if to show her something on the menu. “Look over there, madam,” he said softly. “Kaiser Wilhelm himself.”

A group of military officers talked intently around a table across the room. The most decorated of them was clearly the kaiser, holding forth while the others nodded.

“They say he changes uniforms five or six times a day,” the waiter whispered.

While Mamah waited for her soup to arrive, she studied the other diners. Several women—wives of diplomats and businessmen, no doubt—ate alone at the white linen–covered tables scattered along a wall of high windows like those in her suite. The sound of silver clinking on china echoed in the cavernous space. Beneath the Rafael-like ceiling mural, women balanced hats like great fruit baskets on their heads. They brought to mind porcelain figurines, with their cinched waists, their breasts thrust forward by S-shaped corsets, as they raised teacups to their lips.

When her food arrived, the saffron broth of the bouillabaisse tasted delicious. She devoured the mussels and lobster as fast as propriety allowed, smiling between bites at the wonderful strangeness of it all. Dining alone in Berlin, dressed like a Quaker. In the midst of a passionate love affair. Sitting right across from Kaiser Wilhelm himself.

Mamah wished at that moment that Mattie or Lizzie were there. She would take either one of them right now, just to laugh. To throw back their heads and howl at the absurdity of the situation. She hoped someday they would forgive her enough that they could do that—laugh together again, about anything.