Chapter 19 Der Vorschlag #2
“Chantal can come to Vienna in March or April. Chantal will do this for me—she’ll do this for us, honey,” Jimmy’s mother wrote.
“I think Chantal is realizing that she’ll never meet a Frenchman who doesn’t want to have children—someone who wants only her.
” If Jimmy had seen that coming, he might have stopped reading the letter aloud to his roommates.
Jimmy thought he could have done a better job of preparing Claude for that.
“Wait, wait, wait! What, what, what?” Claude had cried.
“I could have told you Claude never wants to have children, Jimmy,” Jolanda would say later. “We could have both done a better job of preparing Claude,” Jolanda said.
When he sat bolt upright up in bed, Claude unintentionally whacked Jolanda in her mouth with his elbow. “Chantal doesn’t want children?” Claude babbled in prayer mode. “Chantal wants to meet a Frenchman—someone who wants only her?” he asked, clutching Chantal’s photo. Claude’s eyes never left her.
“Don’t wreck the photo, Claude—for now, it’s as close as you’re getting to Chantal,” Jolanda told him. She’d bitten her tongue when Claude hit her in the mouth. Jolanda was exploring her mouth, checking to see if her teeth had been loosened.
If he’d been alone, Jimmy might have stopped reading his mother’s proposal, but even a beginning writer knows the story gathers momentum when you have an audience. “I know you like Chantal, honey, and that’s okay—that makes it easier, doesn’t it?” Jimmy’s mom had written.
“Wait, wait, wait! Do you have the hots for Chantal?” Claude asked Jimmy in a muffled voice. He’d crawled back under the covers to escape Jolanda’s glowering face; her tongue was bleeding.
“Is that what your mom means when she says you like Chantal?” Jolanda asked Jimmy, who just kept staring at his mother’s letter; he couldn’t look at Jolanda. “Holy shit—you have the hots for her,” Jolanda concluded.
“No, no, no,” Claude moaned, shaking his head under the covers—the way Hard Rain would have done it. Jolanda kicked him.
“You know, Claude, I’m not relaxed in bed with you—not with you thrashing around under the covers like a dog,” Jolanda said.
“We’re an unconventional family—aren’t we, honey?
We can do this, can’t we?” Jimmy just kept reading.
“Look at it this way, honey,” Honor went on.
“When you want to marry someone, you’ll be a single father who doesn’t have a first wife or an ex-wife.
You’ll have no wife, just a wonderful kid!
Ideal first marriage, if you ask me, honey!
” Jimmy stopped reading to Claude and Jolanda.
He let the letter fall on the bed; they knew that was the end of it.
Claude had emerged from under the bedcovers. “Your mom’s not kidding, is she?” he asked Jimmy. “But she means well, doesn’t she?”
For once, Jolanda didn’t kick Claude or hit him; she just hugged him. “Holy shit,” Jolanda said softly.
“No, she’s not kidding—yes, she means well,” was all Jimmy could say.
Claude didn’t ask any questions. Even Jolanda had nothing to say.
The foreign students lay in bed like invalids, trying to imagine how Jimmy’s mom and Chantal might have foreseen the potential child’s formative years.
If only to each other, Honor Winslow and Chantal Beaudette must have acknowledged that Jimmy’s child would grow up as their child, too.
James Winslow wouldn’t be an absent father; he would have to maintain a bona fide family relationship with his child.
But for how much longer would Jimmy be a student?
When or if Jimmy wanted to marry someone, how would his mother and Chantal explain such sexual hippieness to Jimmy’s child—even if, by then, the child was a teenager or a young adult?
And what would James Winslow’s child make of his or her status as a ticket out of Vietnam?
In such a stupor, Jimmy and his roommates were lying silent and unmoving—as if they’d been poisoned, or they’d been murdered in bed—when they saw Siegfried’s little hand in the frosted glass of the bedroom door.
They heard the garlic press grate against the glass.
The boy held something aloft in his other hand—what looked like a photograph, which he pressed against the glass oval above his head.
“Was zu sehen,” the five-year-old enunciated, slowly enough for Jimmy to understand him. (“Something to see.”)
“Herein!” Jolanda called to the boy, and he came in.
(“Come in!” Jolanda had said.) Siegfried was eager to show them the photo.
It was a faded black-and-white photograph; the edges were crumpled and torn.
Maybe Siegfried had used undue force, or the garlic press, to free the photo from an old picture frame.
Jimmy’s mistaking Jolanda for a ghost misled him again, but he wasn’t looking at Siegfried’s long-dead ancestors.
The young mother, who resembled a slimmer Irmgard, was Frau Holzinger.
Because she was smiling, Jimmy, Jolanda, and Claude needed a second to recognize her.
Her pretty preteen daughter took them a second to recognize, too.
They’d never imagined that Irmgard might have been pretty, although she once was a pretty little girl.
What gave Irmgard away was her evident anger and depression—even when she’d been ten or eleven, and very pretty.
The dog, of course, was why Siegfried had wanted to show them this family photograph.
The German shepherd sat at attention between the Frau and Irmgard.
The dog’s ears stood straight up, as if the photographer had just given the command to sit!
Whatever command got the shepherd’s attention appeared to have frozen Frau Holzinger and Irmgard.
If the Frau and her daughter had ears like a German shepherd, their ears would have stood straight up, too.
“Eine Hündin?” Siegfried asked the students. (“A female dog?”)
“Eine Moglichkeit,” Jolanda answered. (“A possibility.”)
Given Irmgard’s age, the photo was taken not long after the war—when the Schwindgasse was in the Soviet zone of occupation.
If the photo was taken by a soldier, he was likely a Soviet soldier.
The German shepherd might have been the soldier’s dog.
The photographer could have been the Russian with the gun, the Russian who’d shot Jimmy’s bedroom wall.
(Not Siegfried’s father, James Winslow was thinking.)
Claude torturously asked the five-year-old who’d taken the photo, but Siegfried just shrugged; he didn’t know. The German shepherd in the photograph was the only dog the boy knew, and this dog might have died before Siegfried was born.
“Siegfried!” Frau Holzinger was calling again.
“You should put this back in the picture frame,” Jolanda whispered in German to the child, handing him the photo.
With a nod, Siegfried acknowledged her advice; he slipped the photo inside his shirt and ran out of the bedroom.
With hindsight, your fate is delineated; looking back, you can see where your fate began.
But fate doesn’t tell you when it’s getting started. Siegfried’s fate was just starting.
That night, when Jimmy, Jolanda, and Claude were trying to recover from the sequence of music at the Kaffeehaus Nachtmusik, Jimmy showed his roommates the postcards he’d written to his mom and Chantal.
There was no significance intended by the photograph on the two postcards, which he’d bought in a tobacco shop.
The postcards were identical, a photo of the Karlskirche—St. Charles’s Church, the baroque church in the Karlsplatz, where Claude had been harassed by the xenophobes.
(St. Charles Borromeo was a counter-reformer in the sixteenth century, not to be confused with another Karl—the anti-Semitic mayor of Vienna, Karl Lueger, whom Annelies Eissler loathed.)
The messages on Jimmy’s postcards made no mention of the fact that Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, at age eighteen—before she became the American movie actress Hedy Lamarr—married a thirty-three-year-old munitions manufacturer and Austrofascist in the Karlskirche in 1933.
The messages on Jimmy’s postcards weren’t about Hedy Lamarr.
“Dear Mom: Chantal should meet a Frenchman I know in Vienna. Claude is from Paris, and he doesn’t want children. Chantal should come to Vienna and hang out with Claude, not with me! Love, Jimmy.”
“Dear Chantal: I’m friends with a Frenchman from Paris who never wants children. You should come to Vienna to meet Claude—not to get pregnant! Love, Jimmy.”
The way Claude kept looking at the picture of the Karlskirche, Jimmy thought the Frenchman was recalling the xenophobes he’d encountered in the Karlsplatz, but—pointing to the church—all Claude said was, “Hedy Lamarr married an Austrofascist arms dealer there.”
Back-to-back selections of Schubert’s “Ave Maria,” Bob Dylan’s “Girl from the North Country,” and Wagner’s “Liebestod” (from Tristan und Isolde) had Jolanda overwrought. The death of Jolanda’s love for her dishwasher was more to blame than Wagner, but the love-death music didn’t help.
At a nearby table was a couple with a well-behaved beagle.
Dogs were welcome in many cafés and restaurants in Vienna.
Whenever Claude saw a dog, he questioned why Hard Rain couldn’t hang out in the café instead of being banished to the garbage alley.
This was a murky matter to Jimmy and Jolanda.
Maybe Hard Rain refused to hang out in the café when her owner was in the kitchen washing dishes?
(No one knew if there were restrictions regarding dogs in restaurant kitchens.)