“Forgive me, my dove. But isn’t it too late to go out now? It is snowing.”
“This is Munich. In December. It always snows,” said Ethelinda. Her pleasant tone was dismissive and imperious. “I should think they could find a chair for Herr—”
“Drosselmeier,” supplied Dirk. “Madame, it’s all my fault. I hadn’t seen my old friend in many years, and we lost track of the time. I shall take my leave, asking your apologies for the disturbance.”
Günther came back into the hall. The dog was still yapping in some distant closet. “I think it was your eye-patch that frightened him,” said the boy, as his younger brother, a sprite in blue satin, came trudging forward with his thumb in his mouth. “Why do you wear it?”
“Yes, why?” asked the one who must be Sebastian.
To see these lads, Dirk was filled with a horror of loss for Franz and Moritz Pfeiffer. Those kids had been lumpy and ordinary, Persian anomalies, nothing like these elegant male sylphs. But the way the smoky Pfeiffer children had just evaporated into the husks of their sorry, leaden lives—the loss rose in him. He had to turn.
“Boys, such a personal question!” said Felix. “Shame on you.”
“But he’s a person, so of course the question is personal,” replied Günther, covering his own eye with a patch of fingers.
More or less leaving the matter open to discussion, Dirk made a gesture to request his coat again. How foolish, allowing himself to be beached here in a very wrong place.
Ethelinda addressed her husband. “The Foersters, they’ve been preparing for the feast-day with an ornamented tree in the lobby. It shall be divine. Sebastian, Günther, put on your cloaks and you’d better use your hoods, too. It’s snowing. Surely you’ll join us, Herr Drosselmeier?”
But Dirk made his swift good-byes and fled out into the night. Flakes seethed with pulmonary hiss along the boulevard. The family hung about at the street door, amused and slack-jawed at the flight of their guest. Deep in the bowels of the house, that infernal dog continued to publish his opinions with force and anger.
69.
At some later time, when Dirk had recovered from the sense of being an intruder upon their family hearth, he found himself in the small yellow salon with the Dutch tiled stove in the corner. Felix was poking ineptly at tobacco in a meerschaum. Dirk nursed a beaker of Lyonnais cognac. The boys roughhoused on the carpet behind the settee, sometimes pretending fisticuffs, sometimes settling down to act out scenes with their new toys. Dirk had brought them an Abyssinian and a Sultan. The boys didn’t quite know what the figures signified, but the Sultan seemed dominant because of his starry blue turban, so Günther made the Sultan attack with his head, like a bull with lowered horns, knocking the Abyssinian onto his back over and over. Sebastian was partly laughing and partly crying, being unable to launch a winning feint on behalf of the Abyssinian. When it got too much they threw the toys aside and pummeled each other.
“What I don’t understand, even now,” Felix was saying, “is why you haven’t married, Dirk.”
“Please, is this suitable—？”
“They don’t listen to adults. Why should they? Did you listen to your parents when you were their age?”
Dirk didn’t answer questions about his parents.
“I suppose what I mean,” said Felix, succeeding in getting the pipe to draw at last, “is whether your sympathies are so large as to make your choice difficult. I don’t pretend that everyone would be happy with a wife, but you adored your beloved Nastaran. And you were pestered by friendship with me. Is it that the two energies compete for your attention, and thus make it hard for you to settle?”
“The things you talk about! Why don’t you take up a musical instrument again? Channel some of that curiosity into melodic enquiry, which would irritate a little less.”
“Don’t count on that. I was quite an irritating musician. Am I offending?”
Dirk was happy to have become an acceptable guest in the Stahlbaum household. But he trod carefully. “The person who asks questions like yours always gets to choose the terms,” he said, and shrugged.
“What terms would you choose, were you to turn the question around to me?”
“That’s something I wouldn’t do. Is Ethelinda joining us?”
“In the smoking parlor? The cognac is going to your head. She says she is taking Otto von Blotto out for a stroll up and down the street. But really she’s showing off her new Parisian bonnet. Isn’t she fetching?”
She gave you these grand boys, this comfortable home, thought Dirk. She’s serene and secure and nearly lovely. You might have done a great deal worse.
“Or instead, perhaps you have no—appetites—at all,” continued Felix.
“That’s preposterous,” said Dirk. “I should like right now to knock your head off your shoulders, that’s the appetite I have.” The boys paused their own skirmishes at the sound of Dirk’s raised voice. He had surprised himself and tried to turn it into a bit of theatre. But Felix heard the note in his retort, and put his hand on Dirk’s knee, and poured an inch more cognac. The conversation turned to the possibilities for increased commercial wealth in the revived confederation of German states promised by the March revolution. Felix had every intention to play strategically with the liberal elements and shore up his investments. “My hope is to take possession of a home for the summer in the north—it has come down to me from my grandfather because his wife has died long ago and my miserly father doesn’t want to take it on. A place to which we can repair, as Kurt and Ethelinda have fallen out some time ago, and so we no longer can go to the schloss on the Bodensee.”
“About what did they fall out?” asked Dirk, glad for the change of subject. But it was Felix’s turn to indicate the presence of the boys, who had quietly been amassing a contingent of earlier gifts from Dirk—the two Cathay scholars, the Ukrainian milkmaid, the wide-hipped Mother Ginger with all her little babies that hid in her skirts. The world of toy was lined up along a curl in the Turkey carpet, listening to the grown-ups. The boys’ hands hovered.
At this moment Ethelinda came through and lost control of Otto von Blotto, who raced in and, this once, forgot to abuse Dirk and instead grabbed the new Sultan in his teeth and ran around the sofa, growling.
70.
Felix:
“We do eventually grow up.”
Felix:
“Are you—all—or nothing? More . . . or less?”
Felix:
“Sebastian, get down off Herr Drosselmeier’s lap; you’re too big for that kind of thing.”
Felix:
“I don’t know where childhood goes. Sometimes I remember . . . something. I wonder if you do.”
Felix:
“You so seldom answer me. Am I to be offended?”
Felix:
“Will no one shut that damn dog up?”
Felix:
“Someday it will be too late, Dirk.”
71.
One day, when it was too late, Dirk had found himself in a powder-blue and gilded salon, at a concert to honor the late Frederik Chopin. Though the sinewy, exhaustive explorations called the Nocturnes were still relatively new to the general public, the room was full. The selections were presented by an aesthete with expressive locks, a vampire who played with a violent agitation of his arms. Despite the melodrama of performance, the music itself could muscle up, oh yes, a power to shock.