The Genius (35 page)

Bertha has never been one to succumb to anger; hers has been a life of self-control. She did not become a Muller—remain a Muller—save the Muller name from extinction—by losing her head. She may be sick, but she’s not dead yet, and as long as she can draw breath, she will believe that all problems have solutions; that no turn of events, no matter how bleak, cannot be turned further, bent into an advantage, the barrel twisted back toward the shooter. Her memory has decided to run riot. Fine. Let it. She might not be able to remember the day of the week, but she can bring back her childhood with a thrilling vividness. She will enjoy herself. She opens the album and remembers.

She remembers: walks in the forest and wonderfully sour
Kirschkuchen
and the yeastiness of her father and the soapiness of her mother. Baths in a small wooden tub, the stump of a barrel. A wooden soldier that clapped its hands when you pulled a string in its back, a painted top that cut bright orange circles in the air. The housekeeper taught her to sew until she was reprimanded for doing so and thus Bertha never learned more than a simple running stitch. The day her parents told her they were moving to America she ran crying to her best friend Elisabeth’s house, but nobody answered and in her time of greatest misery she felt lonelier than ever. At home she cried in her mother’s arms and her mother promised We will always be together, I will always take care of you. The journey will be long but you will see so many things girls your age never get to see. Bertha was unconsoled.

The port at Hamburg, the ship’s huge fluted mouth belching loud enough to shake her in her shoes. The waiters in long black coats who called her
Mademoiselle
. In the big dining room she ate snails; they tasted like rubber and butter. She did not get seasick; her mother did. They sun-bathed on their private veranda. Her mother read to her from a book of fairy tales, using different voices for each character. The princes were noble and the princesses gentle and the witches sounded like grinding chains, everyone exactly as they should be. As they sailed into the sunset she thought of her home and she wrote lots of letters to Elisabeth that she intended to deposit in the mailbox as soon as they landed but forgot about when she saw the green lady in the sea.

She remembers her first sight of Central Park, from their hotel window. She was disappointed. She’d hoped it would be bigger. It didn’t compare to the parks and woodlands she knew. It was full of wheelbarrows, trenches, overturned earth. It wasn’t a park; it was a pit. She cried, and to quiet her down, her father gave her a package of peppermints that she ate, one by one, until she was sick.

She remembers school. She remembers being teased. She remembers the tutor. She sells seashells. Who sold those seashells? She never found out.

At Bloomingdale’s, tailors stuck her with pins. She didn’t enjoy the process but then the dress came. Everyone fussed over her, but she didn’t need their confirmation, she could see for herself: she had talent. In yards of green silk, she outshone Lady Liberty herself. Standing before her mother’s three-sided mirror, she decided that it would be terribly ungrateful if she did not use her gifts to become someone important.

She remembers her debut. The eyes all on her, not just the men but the women, too, whether jealous or shamed or in unabashed worship. She remembers descending the stairs on a cloud, her tiara held in place with so many hairpins that she thought her head would break off and roll away. Dancing and champagne and young men’s sweaty hands slipped into hers over and over. Her mother pointing out a certain young man in a narrowly cut jacket. That is Louis Muller, of the Mullers.

And her wedding.

She remembers early summers in Bar Harbor, the gleaming sailboats white, so white, her smocks flawless and dry even in the woolly heat. She changed her outfit four times a day: after breakfast, after lunch, in the afternoon before tea, and then for dinner. So many meals, piled high with those coarse American dishes she would never quite get used to, the Southern-style cornbread that her father-in-law liked but that tasted to Bertha like a block of animal feed. She ate sparingly. While other women talked about the need to reduce, she wore a bathing costume that emphasized her bust. She was the most divine creature on the Eastern Seaboard. So said her father-in-law. Dear Walter. He called her his little Bavarian rose; never mind that her family came from Heidelberg. He was always a little in love with her, openly scornful of his son’s indifference. What a catch Louis had landed, what radiance, what wit, what charm, what skill. She could play the piano. How many girls had a figure like hers? She could count them on one hand. And could any of those girls play the piano? She could count them on one hand, too… if you cut off all her fingers… but then she wouldn’t be able to play the piano. Ha ha ha ha. Walter always implied that, had the vagaries of time not torn them asunder… But she ended up with Louis. Oh Louis. Dear Louis. She wants to be charitable to him. She will choose to think of him fondly.

Think of the delight he took in buying her things, how he loved to adorn her. In the cushions of her house, she has lost diamonds worth a king’s ransom. Think of how he took her everywhere. After David was born she felt sad. It came from nowhere and gummed up her mind. Nights she could not sleep; dragging herself from bed in the morning became torture. To cheer her, Louis bought a villa in Portofino. Every summer after that they would spend a month, the baby tucked away with a nurse and Louis promising not to work at all. They would eat rich meals and drink luscious wines and travel the coast, down to Rome or round the bend to Monaco, where the Prince himself would escort them through the casino. They played with chips made of real gold. Servants brought deep saucers sloshing with champagne and wet towels to cool their necks. And then during the War, when travel became impossible, Louis bought another house for her, a thirty-five-thousand-acre ranch in the middle of Montana. She tired of it quickly. He sold it at a loss. He bought her a home in Deal. He did whatever she wanted. He was a good husband. She cannot think of him now without tearing up; oh, how maudlin. He was a decent man, after all. She was glad that he went without suffering. His heart stopped a few months before the birth of David’s first child. What is the girl’s name. Amelia. For a moment she almost forgot, but she triumphed through sheer willpower. Amelia, yes. And her baby brother, Edgar. The year after Edgar was born, her old friend Elisabeth died. Elisabeth’s husband had been an officer in the SS and after the War they got to him; the stress killed him and then her. What luck. What timing. Every time David has a baby someone dies. A lesser woman might have ordered him to stop having children. He had a son and a daughter; enough already, stop killing off the rest of us. If anyone is to go next it will be her. But she was glad when Yvette got pregnant, regardless of the outcome. Bertha will sacrifice herself for the cause, because Yvette will be a good mother, far better than David’s first wife, who Bertha never liked and never approved of, even though she and Louis played along for appearance’s sake. They even footed more than their share of the bill at the wedding. David argued that they should foot the entire bill; it wasn’t as though they had a shortage of funds. Everyone argued. David was twenty-five then and his bachelorhood had begun to worry her; he might turn out to have his father’s tendencies. Where she had never doubted her own ability to manage Louis, how could she ensure that a prospective daughter-in-law would have the same strength and conviction? Women could not be relied on. Nobody could be relied on. You had to do everything yourself these days. Thankfully, David did get married. A relief to her, on the one hand; and on the other hand, she did not trust the girl he chose, the daughter of a man who owned clothing stores in the Middle West. She called New York ugly. Who was she to be so stuck-up, she came from Cleveland. Whatever Bertha’s opinions of the changes that have taken place in the city since her arrival so many years ago, she firmly believes that nobody has the right to make comments when they’ve been in residence for less than a month. That wicked girl. Bertha can remember her name all right but chooses not to. Picking fights with David over everything, making scenes everywhere, icy dinners where nobody spoke: Bertha thinks about them and suddenly two sets of memories collide: silence and silver on china and crystal on linen… and silences, and— and—and notes delivered by hand, notes from Dr. Fetchett. No, that is not right. That did not happen then. She is mixing up the chronology and she does not want to think about certain things. With tremendous strain she turns the page and finds another one, a page full of good memories, another night, a happy occasion… back to her wedding. Think about her wedding. Think about the liveried footmen and the mighty brass instruments and the dancing legions spinning in her honor; think about her wedding cake, that magnificent tower of buttercream in the shape of a pyramid, the biggest cake anyone had ever seen; they printed a picture of it in the newspaper, and her picture, too. The wedding of Mr. L. I. Muller and Miss Bertha Steinholtz proved undoubtedly the most spectacular event of the season. The bride wore a taffeta gown of surpassing elegance, and the groom his traditional black. The ceremony was performed at the Trinity Church by the Most Reverend J. A. Moffett, and festivities continued.… They called it a fairy tale, and for once they got it right. Her life has been magical.

And now she is old and in a bed and it is 1962. There are things that remain hidden. They should not bother her now, not after so much time. Water under the bridge. But memory, nasty beast, returns again and again.

Not the girl. She can think about the girl without flinching. She has never doubted her decisions and she does not doubt them now. There was too much at stake. Louis could never see that. He told her once that she had no heart but that just showed how deeply he misunderstood the world, how deeply he misunderstood her. She did what she did not because she lacked a heart but because she knew, all too well, how merciless people could be. She remembered being mocked, nightly sobbing, pillows soaked, years of struggle before she came into her own and they could not deny her any longer. Because she was beautiful, and beauty cannot be denied.

But for the girl? An eternity of faux pas. She stood to suffer. What Louis failed to grasp was that Bertha had been acting with mercy.

For David’s tenth birthday she threw a luncheon, hired entertainment, and opened the ballroom. After dessert David played his violin for the guests, most of whom were adults, friends of hers; in those days, he did not have many friends. All told a pleasant afternoon, at least until Louis bolted from the room. She found him on the edge of his bed, face in his handkerchief. It disgusted her: this soft cruelty he had the gall to call mercy. He did not know what true mercy meant. He had never suffered. He had been coddled, fawned over, given a pass on the most vile transgressions. So naturally he assumed that the world would do the same for the girl. Bertha knew better. She knew disgrace. All she wanted was to spare the girl the same.

She wanted to think fondly of him but bitterness seeps through. The girl’s fate began as an argument but grew, over the years, into a towering obstruction between them, a wall of thorns, curling in on itself until they lost sight of each other completely.

It would be easy for a novelist to write And though they continued to live in the same house, they never spoke again. It would be easy but untrue. For the truth is, she still felt kindly toward Louis at moments, and she sensed that he, too, had a kind of lukewarm desire to be in her good graces. In forty years of marriage they laughed many times, shared much mutual pleasure—though not often sexual—and raised a son.

When Louis died, everything came out. By that time the boy was eleven. Eleven years old! Living like a hermit. One old woman to care for him; God knows what sort of perversions took place between them. He barely spoke. The woman, whose name was Greene, said he’d never been one to babble. Bertha told her to be quiet until spoken to.

She wanted to ship the boy as far off as possible, to Europe or Australia, but Dr. Fetchett advised against it, and in a rare moment of equivocation, she had consented to send him to the farthest point in New York state. The problem went away again. This time permanently.

But as she lies high above the earth, full of drugs, wired to electronics, she worries that her efforts have been in vain. The bills come directly to her; she pays them from a personal account. What will happen when she stops? They will come looking for her; they will contact David. With horror, she realizes that they might have done so already.

“David.”

“Mother?”

“How long have I been here.”

“In the hospital, you mean? Six weeks.”

Six weeks sounds like ample time for a bill to come past due. The crisis is upon her, then. David will find out. The story will emerge and everyone will know. She needs to make him understand the need for secrecy. But he comes from a different generation; smugly they call themselves enlightened, without the faintest notion of how quick life is to knock out your teeth. Louis’s softness has found its way into him. She must find a solution. She thinks. Her mind stumbles back and forth between the present and the past. She talks to her husband and her maid. She talks to the television. The room David got her looks less like a hospital and more like a hotel. The walls are wood-paneled; a leaded window in the shape of a star glows gently. She squeezes down on her mind and the answer comes: she will pay the fees now, in advance. She will establish an endowment. She has done that before. At Harvard and Columbia and Barnard people work and learn because of her generosity. She has given money to charities of all stripes, been feted by politicians from every side of the aisle…
she squeezes down
. A problem at hand, she will solve it. She will call the man at the school in Albany and give him an enormous sum of money. Where is her checkbook. Where is the telephone.

“Mother.”

They hold her arms.