Secret Dreams (45 page)

But not all the children had gone to bed. Marie, their sugar-eater, stoutly refused. Maximilian had failed to coax her from her wooden desk, so he let her sit up late, with crayons and paper, in the empty common room, finally slumping down himself at a desk nearby.

Head resting on his folded arms, he saw the eternal Nile. A basket of woven reeds floated along the sheltered bank. A lazy crocodile gazed with jasper eyes over the mudflats and blinked. Maidens washing their clothes waded in the shallow bay. They brought the woven basket to the reed-hidden shore. The crocodile smiled widely at the sun. When the dripping maidens hefted the basket from the blue Nile water, Max awoke and murmured, “Moses in the wombrushes …”

He rubbed the sleep from his eyes. Marie had finished the last touches of a drawing. “Can ! see?” Max asked. The girl had titled it in a scrawl of letters:
The Debt of the WreckShip
, It showed what looked like Noah's Ark but with many more windows and gables, much like their own town house. Sad children's faces peered out. One small child clung to the prow by a single finger. The dangling child was crying, his tears becoming big teardrops, which turned into pools and the pools into oceans.

The butterfly found Frau Direktor alone in her office, writing in a cone of light. He settled on the warm green lampshade and let the sense of her surround him. The black velvet dress enhanced the whiteness of her throat and bosom. He felt the heavy calmness of the woman now — the asthma attack a dim event, as if all her troubles had been honed away. Her hand slipped across the paper in that steady, graceful script:

No, those weren't her words! She'd written in some silly code. Escape. Sick kid. Therapy Help. What was this, an early draft? He couldn't stand any more. What right had she to burden him? All about, he felt the blasting cold lurking beyond the walls. “A butterfly in winter,” she sighed. She meant that they were both doomed. So fragile — existing in the same bubble of time but never coming together now that he might finally tell her things to make a difference. She rose from her desk. The window creaked and the cold stabbed in. “Go on,” she said.

Oh, God! One gust from the open window and he'd vanish like the school itself! She waved her arms and he sailed helplessly out of the warm light. He grappled on the window ledge for a moment, trying to hang on against the bitter wind. “Good-bye,” she said. He beat his way back to the window, crawling on the ledge. Trembling in the cold, he pressed himself to the warm glass.

“Let me explain!” he cried. “Explain!”

But his small voice perished in the air. A staggering gust came and swept him into the icy, agonizing sky.

He saw now that in buying the black velvet dress for her, he had committed an improper act that he could never set right. For it was both a secret promise to a young woman that no young woman could possibly misunderstand, and a secret betrayal of his wife that no wife could ever forgive, But he could not help himself. God, how he
loved
buying her the black dress. Doing it, he felt more tenderness, more passion than any lover.

He'd gone crazy…,

Day after day, hour after hour, a powerful sexual pressure building up in him. While they merely talked in the garden below her window or sometimes just sat in silence, gazing up at the April clouds gliding high above the Burghölzli turrets. Their talk made him a teakettle on a slow flame, coming to a boil with little wisps of steam escaping from the spout. When he bought the dress one of those little wisps escaped.

But in the meantime the ravenous lust ate him alive: an appetite for women, all women, any woman but his wife. Didn't Emma satisfy him? Or was there simply too much of him to draw off in one bed alone? Sudden opportunities presented themselves at every turn. Often starting in some innocuous way, then darkening an innocent encounter with a knowing laugh. The way a flower girl picked out buds from her bucket of tangled stems, or the way a laundress walked with a load of folded linen on her hips, deigning him a smile in her unhurried way.

The mounting steam followed him through his waking hours like women's eyes. On a street corner or when he picked up a fallen umbrella in a trolley, knowing eyes met his with silky words: “Why, danke, sir …” Making him hear other words in their place: “Come home with me,” or simply, “Come along….”

The pressure flowed in and out of his daydreams until he saw a constant parade of women offering themselves. A young nurse lifting her dress for him as he passed in the corridor, while the toothless old charwoman cackled as she mopped the marble floor. No escape, not even in his sleep. For in the deep middle of the night, he imagined ragamuffin Fräulein bending over his sleeping body, putting her wet lips to his mouth, panting over their first midnight kiss.

When she came to him this way, Herr Doktor always felt he should protest, stop her somehow, and he would wake feeling shameful, Emma's warm body beside him in bed. Why didn't he just grope for it, spread her apart and let the pressure flow into her?

Because he saw only the black velvet on the mannikin in the window, the sparkling crystal buttons off its left shoulder — and later the youthful expanse of bosom that pressed toward him when he first saw her wearing it….

The shop was called Scheherazade. The dress glittered in the window as he passed the tiny boutique on the narrow Lindenhof Stairs, glittered the way beautiful fabrics do when they are very expensive, revealing remote depths in their color and texture. How many nights had he wandered out of his way so as to pass the narrow display, how many nights glancing furtively at it before mounting the courage to charge in and look? How many nights before he worked himself up to grip the cold metal knob and plunge inside? Then was shocked to discover the doorknob in his fist not cold at all — but warm. Heated from the room within.

He plunged into the gold and silver light. The shopgirl smiled coyly. “How do you do?” Her words searing him as he rubbed his frozen hands and wondered what to answer, He had imagined actually buying the thing would be nothing, but now he seemed to have lost all power to act.

“The dress in the window,” he stammered. “I'm the gentleman who put a deposit on it, by private messenger. I'd like to pay the balance and have it sent.”

“Oh, so you're the gentleman …,” the shopgirl said. The flicker of a smile. “We were wondering when you were going to stop staring and decide to come in.”

“Yes, I decided.” His hands were warm now, but he kept rubbing them. The awkwardness seemed to cling even as he shed his overcoat across a chair. Still, he felt smooth and happy all over, ready for anything.

“When will Madame come and have it fitted?”

“She won't.”

“Ah, then,” the girl concluded a little doubtfully, “you'll want us to come to your home for a private fitting.”

“No, I don't think so. You can wrap it just as is.”

“But what of the length?” the girl protested gravely. “What if Madame does not like the style?”

“Not like it?” he blurted. The pert shopgirl cast him a guarded look but agreed amiably. “Certainly, Monsieur. Madame would have to be quite mad not to love such a thing.” Then in a businesslike manner she found the shop's deposit stub, took up a pen, and poised over the bill of sale. “May we have Madame's name and address?”

A damning blank descended over Herr Doktor. The shopgirl waited. He groped for a suitable answer, completely at a loss — until the proprietress rescued them both, summing up his predicament in a single glance. Ah, for the gentleman's mistress! Gently dismissing the shopgirl with “Thank you, Sabrina. Please fetch us the tissue and the box.” Then to Herr Doktor, in a quiet, accepting way, “My seamstress will do the fitting at Madame's convenience, of course. A fitting here at the shop, or as you please.”

“Thank you.” Herr Doktor sighed, most relieved.

The shopgirl busied herself with the purchase, peeling the black dress tenderly off the display mannikin. She stuffed it with pink tissue paper, then hung it inside an elegant green upright box. She pressed her pretty hands around the body of the gown, crumpling in more pink tissue paper to keep it snug. How expensive and rich it looked,- she ran her finger along the edge of the shiny green package.

“A fine lady's dress,” the shopgirl said with a touch of envy. “She must be beautiful to wear it.”

“Exquisite.” He had never used the word “exquisite” before. Now it sounded so right to him. The proprietress dutifully took down the address of his office at the Burghölzli. At once Herr Doktor realized all the pressure in his head had gone. And among the three of them a delicious understanding blossomed, an air of gay conspiracy. They all knew the black velvet dress wasn't for Monsieur's wife. The shopgirl's eyes fairly glistened as she slipped the bill of sale into a gold-edged envelope. The proprietress delicately savored the final wrapping of the gift box: binding it with lengths of dark-red ribbon from a spool. Lastly, she tied a six-pointed bow and licked the gum of a glossy black opal seal embossed with the name of the shop. Every little act so skillfully performed. And Herr Doktor saw how the women silently approved of his buying the gown. Of the secrecy. Of an
affaire d'amour
. Both women wishing such a man as he would purchase such a gown for them …

The shop door clicked behind him. As the fresh air stole sweetly into his head, he thought about Emma lying silently beside him at night. He wanted to press himself into her now, press against her clenched thighs, forcing them to rub against him as she liked to do. Rubbing them back and forth until they warmed and opened, and she began to say things like “Come touch me … Touch me now.”

The gown arrived at his office at 10 A.M. the next day. Fräulein had gone down to the garden to sit. From his office chair he saw her on the stone bench in front of the ivy-covered wall. Overhead, a cloud unfolded into a mountainous gray ceiling and the wind picked at the ivy leaves.

Upstairs, he opened the door to 401. The bed had been made, the sheet neatly turned over the blanket. Her trunk dusted. The copper bathtub shined. He sat the elegant green gift box in the chair by her window. Then slipped a note under the red lacquer ribbon.

From Me to You

For Everything

When Fräulein came back upstairs, she paused at her room door, suddenly wary of Zeik and Herr Doktor standing expectantly at the end of the hall. “If you're waiting for me,” she said, “don't bother.” And without further ado vanished into her room.

The minutes passed…. No sound of tissue paper tearing. No cry of delight. Herr Doktor and the orderly stared at each other. Zeik shrugged, confounded. They had imagined her ripping off the ribbon, laying open the box, and reaching inside. A fine swooshing, crackling sound. Then holding the gown to herself, waltzing one-two-three! around the tiny room. But no — only obstinate silence.

After ten minutes, Herr Doktors curiosity got the better of him. He went to the door and knocked. Come in.

She held her palm against the shiny green box as if silently worshiping its beautiful, perfect form. His note lay on her lap. “Why don't you look inside?” he asked. A chasm of hurt had opened at his feet.

“Not now,” she said softly. “I will, though. I promise I will.”

An irresistible force urged him to push her, make her open the thing, acknowledge his buying it — as when he marched her to the dayroom. But this time he swayed at the lip of the chasm and held back. Asking, “Don't you want to know?”

She gingerly touched the black opal seal with Scheherazade engraved in raised letters. “It's a dress from a dressmaker's,” Fräulein said in a husky whisper. “It's a beautiful lady's dress. One I have to take care of. One to go to the theater in. And to dinner. And act normal in. You're saying you want me to put on a dress and act like a lady.”

“You are a lady,” he told her.

She examined every crevice of his face to see if he lied, had any doubt, betrayed any jest in his words.

“I'm not a lady yet. But you want me to be, don't you?”

“Is it such a bad thing?”

Her hands roved over the box, feeling the smoothness of its top, the fine construction of its sides. Her fingers glided over the long expanse, tenderly petting it with love and pain and sadness — not daring to believe the magic glory of it all. “Scheherazade …,” she whispered into its green depths. “I'm so scared.”

They had invited her to a dinner party. A party for her! The engraved invitation came on Herr Doktor Frau's personal stationery, hand delivered by Orderly Zeik. A creamy white card with blue piping around the border and a watermark on top, back-to-back capital J's with given-name initials on either side.