A Summer In Europe (28 page)

“Where is our hotel from here?” Louisa asked, an innocent enough question to Gwen’s ear.

But Thoreau sent her a momentarily offended glare, and Emerson, who’d been entrusted to snag a city map from Guido’s stash on the bus before they parted from the tour group, waved the folded paper in the air at her like a fan. “No worries. It’s not far.” Without so much as a glance at the map, he pointed down one of the nearby streets. “We can start walking toward it.”

His brother, however, seemed to want to autocorrect Emerson’s directions, like a GPS device dead set on “recalculating” at every turn. After yet another half hour had gone by, Gwen couldn’t help but notice that they’d been traveling in an odd stair-step pattern, first in one direction and then in the other. She recognized a few buildings she knew they’d passed, and she realized, with a bolt of shock, that the guys didn’t actually
care
about the direction they were headed. In studying them silently for a few turns, as they chattered at the three women (although they exchanged not a word with each other), it dawned on her that their interest was in testing whose leadership was more persuasive. In determining who could more often steer the women down one street or other simply by the magnetic pull of his personality.

Fascinating? Yes.

Conducive to getting them back to the hotel on time? No.

She shot each brother a warning glance before pointing at her watch and saying, “We only have an hour left before the bus leaves to the show. Perhaps we need to check the map now. Just to make sure we’re going in the right direction. I’m pretty sure our hotel is
by the river
.”

Emerson laughed off her suggestion without comment. Thoreau pretended not to hear her and led Louisa around another corner ... onto a street that Gwen
knew
would take them back toward the City Park and away from the Danube.

Cynthia shared a concerned look with her as the certainty of their whereabouts—or lack thereof—became as evident to the British woman as it was to Gwen.

“Gentleman, Gwen had a clever idea about checking the map. Or, if you’d rather, we do know the name of our hotel,” Cynthia said reasonably. “Shall we just hire a cab and ask the driver to take us—”

“No,” both men said together, cutting her off.

She blinked in surprise and eyed Gwen again as if to say,
What the hell?

Gwen rolled her eyes and Cynthia actually smiled and mouthed, “Men ...” Then, to the guys, she said, “Well, Hans-Josef would know how to get us back the fastest way.” She pulled out her mobile phone threateningly. “I’ll ring him and—”

“Not necessary, Cyn,” Thoreau said, his voice, perhaps, a touch too sharp.

And Emerson swiveled around and bit his lip before shrugging and pulling out the paper map in resignation.

Gwen stifled a snicker. She had to hand it to Cynthia. Effective tactic. She nodded approvingly at the other woman, who nodded back and motioned for Louisa to come join the two of them.

“The Edwardian games are afoot,” Cynthia murmured to Gwen and Louisa as Emerson studied the map several yards away and Thoreau, standing as far away from him as possible, studied the bark of some roadside tree.

“Do they get like this often?” Gwen asked.

“Only when they’ve spent too much time in one another’s company,” she whispered with a soft laugh. “Christmas is usually the most dreadful. They try to score points off each other during the entire Yuletide season and will play with anything, or anyone, in their path. They bat everyone around like a cricket ball.”

This time Gwen looked at Cynthia more seriously and realized Thoreau had been dead wrong in his assessment of her. Cynthia saw him. And Emerson. And probably Hans-Josef, too. She saw them all very clearly ... but, for some reason, she just liked them anyway. Liked each man despite his faults. And in spite of—or, maybe, because of—his differences from the others. Liked them without bitterness, even when they were using her. Or dismissing her.

“They’re rather intense,” Louisa agreed, as the three women watched Thoreau reach the limit of his patience.

He pushed away from the tree he’d been faux inspecting, strode over to his brother and snatched the map out of Emerson’s hands.

“Bloody bastard, don’t just grab—” Emerson began.

“This is in fucking
Hungarian,
” Thoreau said with incredulity, pointing at the paper. “Why the hell didn’t you—oh, here’s a bright thought—get a map in a language you can read? You know enough of them.”

Emerson said something distinctly unflattering about his brother, first in German, then in Italian and, finally, in French.

“What? Saving the Arabic and Russian insults for later?” Thoreau muttered.

Emerson replied with a string of obscenities in a language Gwen couldn’t identify. Then he crumpled up the map, lobbed it at his brother and took several purposeful steps away from the path he’d been heading. “I know where we are and precisely how to return us to the hotel,” he insisted, a point which Gwen
almost
believed. At least, she believed
he
believed it.

Men from around the globe were united by one common conviction: They’d rather be put to death by fire than ask anyone else for directions. Or even read a stupid map.

Which was why she was in no way surprised when Thoreau, instead of uncrinkling the map and piecing together their location based on the few landmarks they could identify in Hungarian, tossed the paper out, surveyed the streets and the position of the sun critically and then grudgingly agreed that Emerson was, at last, heading in the right direction.

By the time they reached their hotel, some of the brothers’ steam had dissipated, but the bus was just pulling away from the front drive. It had to be clear to everyone in their tour group that the five of them were nowhere near ready to go to an operetta. All of them were still wearing their street clothes and a few perceptive tour members likely guessed they hadn’t even eaten their dinner yet. Hans-Josef was understandably ticked.

He had Guido stop the bus and open the door. Dressed in a stylish navy suit that complemented his eyes and offset his fair hair, he descended the steps quickly. “You are very late,” Hans-Josef said, arms crossed, enunciating every word with precision laced with annoyance. “I left your tickets with the concierge, but we must go now. Join us ... or not.”

Emerson was the first to step forward and offer an apology. “It was my mistake. We’ll change and arrange to go to the concert hall as soon as humanly possible.”

Thoreau cleared his throat. “Thank you for waiting as long as you did. We appreciate it. We will do our best not to be disruptive when we come in.”

Their tour guide was slightly mollified. He shrugged, reentered the bus and nodded seriously at them once as the tour group pulled away. Gwen caught sight of Aunt Bea’s jubilant expression through one of the windows. Gwen waved to her elated relative and tried very hard not to sigh at the obvious enthusiasm.

They agreed to meet back in the lobby in a half hour—time enough only to wash up quickly, change into something semiformal and eat a snack to tide them over until after the performance.

“We’ll treat you ladies to a nice meal when the operetta ends,” Thoreau told them before they dashed off to their rooms. And Emerson demonstrated his wholehearted agreement by not arguing with his sibling for once.

When they reconvened, it was as a changed and oddly bonded group. Cynthia, looking stunning in a black, low-cut, sequined cocktail dress with a gauzy matching shawl, leaned over to Gwen, who was wearing a simple but classic tea-length ivory silk, and said, “You look lovely.” And Louisa, dressed boldly in a dazzling red gown, nodded approvingly at the other two women as the guys approached them.

Thoreau was, without question, attractive. He was a classically tall, dark and handsome man. Strong bone structure. Eye-catching physique. Warm smile, when not scowling at his kid brother. Intelligent expression in his eyes.

But, to Gwen, Emerson was a different kind of attractive. He had many of the same physical features as Thoreau, save for the shade of his hair color and a few additional inches in stature, but her internal response to the totality of Emerson created an altogether distinct chemical reaction. Like when a scientist mixed two clear, liquid compounds in a beaker and ended up with something that immediately turned a shocking violet. Had he mixed either of those clear liquids with something else, they would have remained unchanged or, at most, the clear one would have taken on the hue of the other compound, had it been tinted. But get the right two chemicals together and—

“Ready to go, ladies?” Emerson asked them, but he was looking directly at her.

She, Cynthia and Louisa said they were set.

“Good,” Thoreau said. “We rang the desk from our room. They should have our taxi waiting.”

They made it to Vigadó Concert Hall—a “place of merriment,” according to the cabbie’s translation—in record time. They missed only the opening song or two and, during the applause, they were discreetly ushered to their seats.

Gwen found herself positioned between Thoreau and Emerson, directly in the middle of the fivesome. Cynthia was to Emerson’s right and Louisa sat to Thoreau’s left. Hans-Josef and most of the tour members were in the row just ahead of them. Their guide glanced back at them and smiled briefly. It lit up his face, but there was something more to it. A delight in his expression that was new. Gwen didn’t understand why at first. Then she looked more closely at the program.

“Operettenkonzerte,”
it read.
“Die schönsten Melodien aus Lustige Witwe, Zigeunerbaron, Zirkusprinzessin ...”

Ah, German. The orchestra was from Budapest, but the songs, Emerson explained, were going to be performed in Hans-Josef’s native tongue. Gwen gathered that, after weeks of Italian, Hungarian and altogether too much English, their tour guide was craving a little bit of home.

Their highlighted selections featured music from four composers—two Hungarians, Lehár and Kálmán; and two Austrians, Strauss and Stolz—but Gwen didn’t understand a word from any of the solos or duets in the program.

She did, however, appreciate the energy and spiritedness of the performers, and she truly liked the setting. The hall was warmly lit and the concert stage relatively small but tastefully decorated with long-necked vases and pastel floral arrangements. An intimate place for a show compared to some of the great auditoriums of Europe, but it was this very quality that made the performance so unique. So personal. The strings were like a lively row of perfectly in-sync seamstresses, each flick of their bows like the pulling of yarn through fabric as they wove through the melody. She watched them, mesmerized.

Yet, even these musical delights were not enough to completely block out the interpersonal drama she was—quite literally—in the middle of when it came to Emerson and Thoreau. Their movements were an exercise in subtleties and nearly imperceptible gestures. If she happened to whisper a comment to one brother or even lean more toward one of them, the other would invariably counter with a word or a motion intended to bring her closer to him instead. She was the knot in the center of their tug-of-war rope again but, thankfully, smart enough to know it wouldn’t have mattered who was sitting in her seat.
Anyone
in her position would have gotten this unenviable role. Even Cynthia shot her a sympathetic glance a time or two during the concert.

On the other hand, she tried to get what benefit she could from the situation. Both Edwards men were more than happy to translate bits of the performance to her. Turned out that Thoreau had spent one college year abroad in Vienna studying psychology (“Freud’s city, you understand,” he explained), so his German was stellar and, actually, even better than Emerson’s, whose reason for picking up that particular language stemmed from his innate unwillingness to let his elder brother best him in anything. Apparently, decades of sibling rivalry made both brothers better linguists.

“And better musicians,” Emerson added, when she confronted him on this point.

Thoreau overhearing, of course, chimed in, “And better drivers,” to which his kid brother sent him a steely glare. Gwen gathered there was a family story involving cars that she hadn’t yet heard.

“Better public speakers,” Emerson lobbed at him.

“Better athletes,” Thoreau countered. “And, naturally, better chess players.”

Emerson snickered and took a deep breath. “Better lovers,” he shot back, raising his voice just enough that a couple of older women in the row behind them gasped.

“Okay, guys. Enough,” Gwen said firmly. And for the rest of the concert neither of them spoke again. Not to each other, and not even to her.

When the show was over, Hans-Josef couldn’t contain his jubilation. He kept turning to everyone around him, shaking their hands and exclaiming, “Oh,
wunderbar!
It was good,
ja?
To hear songs from
Das Glücksmädel
and
Die Fledermaus
...”

What could Gwen say to that but
“Ja.”

Aunt Bea overheard her and slapped her knee, laughing silently.

They slowly filtered out of the hall, Guido already waiting with the bus to return the group members to the hotel for the night. The Edwards boys, however, had promised the three women a meal and had no intention of letting Gwen, Louisa or Cynthia escape the commitment. But the decision of where to go next was just another opportunity for a brotherly battle.

“Pardon us a moment,” Emerson said grimly as he nudged his brother to one corner of the lobby to discuss their options, leaving Cynthia, Louisa and Gwen to exchange looks and talk amongst themselves for a few minutes. The glow of the performance faded somewhat as the concert hall emptied—at least for Gwen—but Louisa smiled, her gaze distant and wistful.

“I remember having a night out like this in Budapest once before,” Louisa confided to them. “It was utterly delightful.”

“With Ian?” Cynthia asked, her tone one of surprise.