The Danish Girl (34 page)

“So,” she said. “Tomorrow it is,” and she lowered Lili’s head into her lap, and they closed their eyes and received the weak heat of the sun. They listened to the muted squeals of the girls on the lawn, and the far-away splash of a paddlewheel on the Elbe. Greta thought of Teddy Cross, whom she had also once thought of as capable of miracles. There was that time with Carlisle’s leg. Greta and Teddy had been married only a few months, and they were living in the Spanish house in Bakersfield, and the first hot winds were beginning to blow through the eucalyptus groves.

Greta was pregnant with baby Carlisle and sick on the sofa from Gump’s. One day Carlisle drove over the Ridge Route in his yellow- fendered Detroiter to visit them and to investigate potential oilfields.

The strawberry fields were a carpet of green that spring, edged by the buttery gold of the poppies in the foothills. Men from Los Angeles and San Francisco had begun descending on Bakersfield as word got out that there might be oil beneath the land. The farmer to the south of Teddy Cross’s parents had sunk a well with his hoe-ax and struck oil. Teddy was sure his parents could hit oil too, and Greta secretly wondered if Teddy felt the need to become rich in a strange effort to match her. In the late afternoons, after tending to Greta, he would drive out the rutted road to the Cross land and drill in the long shadow of an old oak. He used a tool with a gyre blade that could be extended with attachments; and with the sun glinting off the silvery underside of the strawberry leaves, Teddy would grind the drill through the loam.

And then Carlisle drove into Bakersfield. He was still lame then, on a pair of hand-cast crutches that came to his elbows, their grooved handles made of carved ivory. He had a second pair cast in sterling silver, which Mrs. Waud requested him to use on formal occasions. On his first night at the Spanish house, while Greta was sleeping, she would later learn, Teddy drove Carlisle out to the Cross land and showed him his well. “I’m worried about disappointing them,” Teddy said of his parents, who were huddled in their little house, the wall planks separated with gaps wide enough for the wind. The hole in the ground was about as wide around as a thigh and surrounded by a wood platform. Teddy pulled up a sample of dirt with a cup attached to the rope. They examined it, the mouths of both young men open. Teddy looked to Carlisle, as if he expected him, just because he was up at Stanford, to be able to discern something from the cup of black soil. “Do you think there’s oil down there?” Teddy asked.

Looking over to the knotted oak at the edge of the strawberry field and then up to the purpling sky, Carlisle said, “I’m not really sure.”

They were out there a half hour, standing in the sunset, as the wind kicked up the dust and hurled it at their ankles. The bowl of the sky was dimming, and the stars were beginning to glitter. “Let’s get going,” Teddy said, and Carlisle, who never once blamed Teddy Cross for all that had happened to Greta, said, “All right.”

Teddy moved to the truck, and Carlisle followed, except the cap of his crutch caught between the boards of the platform, and the next thing he knew his leg, the bad one, slipped down the well like a snake. He would have laughed at how quickly he found himself splayed on the platform, except that his leg had come back to life with pain. Teddy heard his cry and ran back to the dry well, saying, “Are you okay? Can you get up?”

Carlisle couldn’t get up, his leg jammed into the hole. Teddy began to peel away the planks with a crowbar, the boards coming loose with a creak that howled across the fields. The coyotes in the foothills were howling too, and the still black of the Bakersfield night was brought to life with Carlisle crying softly into his own shoulder. An hour passed before he was pried free, exposing the leg broken in the shin. There was no blood, but the skin was turning darker than a plum. Teddy helped Carlisle into the truck, and then drove him west through the night, across the width of the valley, the fields changing from strawberry to red leaf lettuce to vineyards and finally to pecan orchards, and then over the mountains and into Santa Barbara. It was nearly midnight when a doctor with a monocle set Carlisle’s leg, while a night nurse with a rusty red bob dipped strips of gauze into a tub of plaster. Then, much later, almost at dawn, Teddy and Carlisle pulled into the bamboo-shaded drive of the Spanish house. They were exhausted and, finally, home.

Greta was still sleeping. “Asleep since you left,” said Akiko, whose eyes were as black as the bruised skin on Carlisle’s shin. And when Greta woke, she was too drowsy with nausea to notice the plaster cast on Carlisle’s leg; the cast was so chalky that it left little patches of dust wherever Carlisle dragged it. The dust Greta noticed, wondering with half-interest—as she always did with housework—where it had come from, swiping it from the cushion of the ottoman. She knew Carlisle had been injured, but it hardly registered with her at all. “Oh, I’m fine,” Carlisle reported, and Greta left it at that, because the only way to describe how she felt was as if she had been poisoned. She looked at the cast and rolled her eyes back into her head. And when the summer descended and the mercury in the thermometers capped out at 110 degrees and Greta finally gave birth, the cast was sawed off Carlisle’s leg. The baby was dead, but Carlisle’s leg was healthier than it had ever been since that day when Greta and he were six. There was still a bit of a drag in the foot, but Carlisle no longer needed the crutches, and he could stride right into the Spanish house’s step-down living room without holding the rail.

“The only good thing to come of Bakersfield,” Greta would sometimes say.

Then, for the rest of their marriage, she thought of Teddy Cross as a man capable of miracles—once, when she saw his lips pressed together in concentration, it seemed to Greta that he could do anything at all. But when Lili said the same of Professor Bolk, Greta looked down to the Elbe and counted the boats and then counted the girls on the lawn, and said, “We will see.”

CHAPTER Twenty-three

Lili woke herself up screaming. She didn’t know how long she’d been sleeping, but she could feel the cap of morphine laced across her brain, her eyelids too heavy to lift.

Her shrieks were high and glassy and, even Lili knew, sliced through the corridors of the Municipal Women’s Clinic, erupting a pimpling chill on the spines of the nurses and on the skin stretched across the bellies of the pregnant girls. There was an inflamed pain in the lower half of her body. If she’d had the strength, Lili would have lifted her head and looked down to her own middle to see if a bonfire burned there, baking the bones in her pelvis.

She dreamily felt as if she’d risen above her bed and was now looking down: little Lili, her body carved into existence by Professor Bolk, lay strapped beneath the blanket, her arms spread out, the underside of her wrists pale green and exposed. Ropes braided from Italian hemp crossed her legs, sandbags hanging from them, dangling heavily next to the bed. There were four on each side, each bag hooked to a thick rope that ran over Lili’s shins, holding them down against the spasms.

A nurse Lili didn’t recognize ran into the room. She was full-breasted and mustached, and cried, “What can I get you?” She pushed Lili back against the stack of pillows.

It was as if the screaming belonged to someone else. For a moment Lili thought maybe it was Einar who was screaming: perhaps his ghost was rising inside her. It was a terrible thought, and she sank her head into the pillows and sealed her eyes. But she was still screaming—she couldn’t help herself—her lips chapped and crusted in the corner and her tongue a thin dry strip.

“What’s wrong?” the nurse kept asking. She seemed only partially concerned, as if she had seen this before. She was young, with a glass-bead necklace that cut into her throat. Lili looked at the nurse, at the throat so padded with flesh that it nearly hid the necklace, and thought maybe she had seen the nurse before. The line of fine hairs above her lip—that was familiar—and the breasts stretching the bib of her apron. “You mustn’t move,” the nurse was saying. “It’ll only make it worse. Try to be very still.”

The nurse brought a green rubber mask to Lili’s face; out of the corner of her eye Lili could see the nurse turn the nozzle of the tank and release the ether. And this was when Lili realized she had met the nurse before. She had a weak memory of waking herself up by screaming; and then the nurse rushing in, her breasts, caught in the apron’s bib, swinging over Lili as she took Lili’s temperature. There was the readjustment of the ropes across Lili’s shins, and the glass stick of the thermometer slipped beneath her tongue. All this had happened before. Especially the cone of the green rubber mask, which fit snugly over Lili’s mouth and nose, as if one of the factories up the Elbe whose flame-rimmed smoke-stacks belched the black effluvium of poured plastic and rubber had molded it especially for her.

It was several weeks before Lili began to emerge from the pain, but eventually Professor Bolk eliminated the doses of ether. The nurse, whose name was Hannah, unhooked the sandbags, freeing Lili’s legs. They were too thin and blue for her to be able to walk down the corridor, but she could sit up again, for an hour or two each morning, before the daily morphia injection that would sink into her arm with the deep sting of a wasp.

Nurse Hannah would wheel Lili down to the
Wintergarten.
There she would leave Lili to rest, parking the wheelchair next to a window and a potted fern. It was May, and outside the rhododendrons were puckered and full. Along the wall of Bolk’s laboratory, in the bed of soil and compost, tulips were reaching toward the sun.

On the lawn, with its litter of dandelions, Lili watched the pregnant girls gossip. The sun was bright against their white necks. Since the end of winter, there were new girls. There would always be new girls, Lili thought, sipping her tea, pulling the blanket over her lap, which beneath the blue hospital gown and the pads of gauze and the iodine dressing was open and weepy and raw. Ursula was no longer at the clinic, and this confused Lili. But she was too tired and too softened with drug to consider it further. She had once asked Frau Krebs about Ursula, and she had rearranged Lili’s pillows and said, “Don’t worry about her. Everything is fine now.”

Greta could visit only a few hours each afternoon. A rule, instituted by Professor Bolk and enforced by the metallic voice of Frau Krebs, banned visitors in the mornings and evenings. These were the times when the girls of the clinic were to be alone but together, as if their condition and trouble were a seal of camaraderie that outsiders couldn’t share. And so each day Greta would visit from just after lunch, when Lili’s lip would still hold a spot of potato soup, until late afternoon, when the shadows grew long and Lili’s head would loll into her chest.

Lili looked forward to the sight of Greta entering the glassed-in
Wintergarten
. Often a large bouquet of flowers—first jonquils, then, as the spring progressed, snapdragons, and finally pink peonies—would hide Greta’s face as she appeared in the door. Lili would wait patiently in her wicker wheelchair, listening to the clack of Greta’s shoes on the tile floor. Often the other girls would whisper about Greta
(“Who’s the tall American with the gorgeous long hair?”),
and that talk—the airy voices of the girls whose breasts were filling daily with milk—pleased Lili.

“As soon as we get you out of here,” Greta would say, settling into a recliner, her legs up on the long white cushion, “I’m going to take you straight back to Copenhagen and let you have a look around.”

Greta had been promising this since she arrived from Paris: the train and ferry back to Denmark; reopening the apartment in the Widow House, which had remained shuttered for years; a spree in the private dressing room of Fonnesbech’s department store.

“But why can’t we go now?” Lili would ask. Not once in five years had she or Greta returned to Copenhagen. Lili had a vague memory of Einar instructing the shippers, with their sleeves rolled to their elbows, to handle carefully the crate that held his unframed canvases. She remembered watching Greta empty the drawers of the pickled-ash wardrobe into a little trunk with leather hinges that Lili never saw again.

“You’re not quite finished here,” Greta would remind Lili.

“Why not?”

“Only a little more time. Then we can go home.” How pretty Greta was, in her paneled skirt and her high-heel boots, resting next to Lili. Greta had never loved anyone more than her, Lili knew. Now—now that even her government papers claimed she was Lili Elbe—she felt certain Greta wouldn’t change. It was what got Lili through it, through the lonely nights in the hospital room beneath the heavy blanket, through the bouts of pain that sneaked up and mugged her like a thief. Lili was always changing, but not Greta, never Greta.

Professor Bolk would sometimes join Lili and Greta, standing over them, Greta’s legs stretched out on the recliner, Lili in her chair. “Won’t you sit with us?” Greta would ask, repeating her request three or four times, but the professor never stopped long enough to take the cup of tea that Lili always poured for him.