“A femme fatale?”
“Yes. To have that power.”
Geli smiled. “You aren’t a vampire or anything, are you?”
“I promise you’ll be the first to know.” With one hand behind her head, Henny tilted the lone tallow candle that was flaring in the darkness, and the flame deformed as white candlewax spilled onto the windowsill. “Are you still a virgin?”
Geli confessed she wasn’t.
“Who?”
“Oh,” she sighed, “I forget.”
“In Wien?”
“Change the subject.”
“Are you and Emil…?”
“We aren’t married, Fräulein Hoffmann.”
Henny jolted up onto her elbows to fascinatedly peer at Geli. She scoffed, “Emil is suddenly moral now? Emil Maurice?”
With false and defensive prudishness, Geli offered, “With me, yes.”
“Then he’s afraid of your Uncle Adolf,” Henny said, and fell forward onto her pillow. She spidered a few fine brown hairs from her face and seemed prepared to sleep as she said, “Who isn’t.”
“Your father?”
“Heinrich? Hah!”
“My mother.”
“Angela? Oh, please. She’ll do whatever he says. Anytime he says it. Won’t she?”
Nothing was said.
Henny grinned. “What a good game: Who’s not frightened of Adolf Hitler? Try to think. Herr Doktor Goebbels?”
“Definitely frightened.”
“Herr Himmler? Of course, yes.”
“Rudi shamelessly confesses it.”
“Who else?” Henny asked. “Herr Rosenberg?”
“That toady.”
“And Herr Göring’s a child around your uncle.”
“And wears his childishness like a medal.”
“Are you?” Henny asked.
“Still a virgin? I answered that.”
Henny nudged her shoulder.
Geli thought, and finally said, “No. I’m not afraid of him.”
Quiet took even the sounds of their breathing into its stomach. There was only the faint hiss of the candle. And then Henny conceded, “I think that’s probably true.”
“What do I win?”
She was silent for a while, then said, “My amazement.”
On July 28th, they celebrated Angela Raubal’s forty-fifth birthday by letting her sleep in while Geli and Henny fabricated a breakfast of flambéed crêpe suzettes, orange sections and grapes, and a full pot of Italian espresso. Leo Raubal took a four a.m. train from Wien to get there in time, and was with them when they sneaked into Angela’s room with the food tray and woke her by singing the first verses of a song from Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, Angela’s favorite opera.
She was first astonished by the flooding sunshine and hunted for the alarm clock that her daughter had stolen in the night. “What time is it?”
“Half ten,” Geli said. “We let you sleep.”
With shock Angela then noticed her tall, nearly twenty-two-year-old son, and she started fussing with graying hair, that was as forked and twisted as seaweed. She gruffly said, “Aren’t you cruel children to surprise me like this.”
Leo grinned. “We thought about inviting in the others, too. They didn’t know the song.”
Angela heard Heinrich Hoffmann shouting a joke in the dining room, that Göring was the first man to ascend to a higher realm by means of a parachute. Many men heartily laughed. She held a sheet up over the front of her nightgown. “Who’s here?”
“Emil came,” Geli said. “And Putzi Hanfstaengl, all the way from France.”
“Also my father, as you hear,” said Henny. “And what’s-his-name, the man who lost his toes on the front.”
“Julius Schaub,” Geli said.
“To be with their leader,” Angela said. “Otherwise he might forget them. Are they hungry?”
Geli told her mother they’d been fed, and that the Bechstein’s chauffeur would be taking Angela and her friend Ilse Meirer to Salzburg for the day, so she ought to make herself beautiful.
“And what will you do with all those men?”
“We’re going to the Chiemsee for a picnic.”
Aching as she got out of bed, Angela avoided foul language with the slang, “Oh green nine.” And as she hobbled to the bathroom she said, “You ask too much of your old mother on her birthday.”
Geli changed into a fitted navy blue sundress with a white geometric pattern, white ankle-high socks, and brown oxfords. She brushed her hair for the third time that morning and went downstairs to the dining room.
Putzi Hanfstaengl was now a Herr Doktor, having finally gotten his D. Phil. degree in history with a dissertation on the Austrian Netherlands and Bavaria in the eighteenth century; but he was talking with Hoffmann about his family firm’s photography of the art masterpieces of the Louvre, a permission just recently given them by the director, Henri Verne, a nephew of the famous novelist.
“So you’ll be rich!” Hoffmann said.
“If the books sell, possibly.”
“We’ll have to celebrate with champagne.”
Julius Schaub frowned. “Always the drinking.”
Joking with Hoffmann, Putzi referred to Schaub as “Il Penseroso,” but it fell flat because no one else there knew Italian.
“Who’ll want beer?” Geli asked, and four hands flew up.
Emil stood. “I’ll help.”
She shyly smiled and felt Emil watching the feminine tilt of her hips as she went to the kitchen ahead of him. Henny was filling their picnic hamper with Apollinaris mineral water and vacuum flasks of coffee and tea, so Emil hauled a full crate of Spaten out to the trunk of Hitler’s Mercedes.
Then Hitler finally came downstairs and into the dining room, for she heard the other men collectively stand from their chairs and heard Putzi say, “I have the foreign press clippings here.”
And then her uncle gracefully walked into the kitchen in his gray flannel summer suit and yellow tie, a red-and-black swastika pin on the suit jacket’s lapel. His forelock fell as he examined the food wrapped in waxed paper: Swiss cheese and salami and hot, roasted chicken.
“Won’t you make me a peanut butter sandwich?” he whined to his niece. “And put in some Bahlsen biscuits? And chocolate, and an apple tart? Make me lunch like always, Princess; nothing fancy or new.”
She sighed and did as he said.
Emil and Leo wandered in and Hitler told Geli’s brother what a good Hausfrau she was becoming. “She cooks, she cleans, she sews!”
“Rare talents,” Geli said.
Leo Raubal hunted for a handmade cigarette in his front shirt pocket, held it to a flame underneath the tea kettle on the stovetop, and was inhaling it before he noticed the shocked silence and his uncle’s scorn.
“We don’t smoke inside the house,” Emil said.
“I’m allowed,” Leo confidently said. “I have rank in the Austrian SA.” And then he felt his family staring at him in silence. “A firing squad offense?” Leo asked.
“We don’t joke about it,” his uncle told him.
Leo jarred the screen door open and flicked his cigarette outside.
And then they got into the cars. Emil and Hitler were up in the front of the red Mercedes convertible, and Henny and Geli joined Putzi Hanfstaengl in the back where the Herr Doktor could hang his long legs over the folded-down middle seat. Hitler found linen caps in the glove compartment and handed them to his niece and the girl he called Sunshine so their hair wouldn’t fly wildly in the wind, and he and Emil strapped on their cold weather leather aviators’ caps. “Prinz!” Hitler called. “Ride!” And the Alsatian galloped down from the house and jumped inside the car, scrabbling his paws on the jump seat before finding a space on the floor next to Geli.
Heinrich Hoffmann, Julius Schaub, and Leo Raubal climbed into Hoffmann’s old Daimler where smoking was not just permitted but was assured. And Angela waved good-bye to them from the upstairs balcony in her purple flapper’s dress an
d cloche hat.
The Chiemsee was a fairly substantial lake with three islands, fifty kilometers northwest of Haus Wachenfeld, but Hitler maintained that the water there was three degrees centigrade warmer than the far closer Königssee, and his enthusiasm for fast automobiles was still so fresh that he considered most highway travel to be a good form of recreation; so they journeyed an hour north. Currying favor, Putzi hulked forward on the fold-down seat to pass on an invitation to visit Adolf Müller, the printer of the Völkischer Beobachter, whose luxurious summer home was in St. Quirin on the Tegernsee, just fifty kilometers south of München; but Hitler told him he couldn’t possibly go there, for the many journalists out to destroy him only thought of the Tegernsee as a playground of the very rich.
Putzi Hanfstaengl admitted that this was true. “I have heard it called the ‘Lago di Bonzo.’”
“Which is?”
“Mafia Italian for ‘Lake of the Big Shots.’”
When Hitler laughed hugely, hitting his thigh with the flat of his hand, Putzi felt he could sit back. The Alsatian was standing high on his hind legs, his forelegs on the fold-down seat, and avidly sniffing the air for florid tales of wildflowers, Benzine, macadam road, finches, fences, wet meadows, and milk cows. Geli and Henny were singing American tunes they’d memorized. Putzi smilingly listened through two songs and then challenged their English pronunciation. “Some-vun to votch o-fer me?” he asked. “Yas! Vee haff no bahn-nahn-az?”
“Close enough,” Henny said.
They sang “Ain’t We Got Fun?” and “Ain’t She Sweet?” and then they couldn’t fully recall other lyrics, so Putzi filled the ride by teaching them strange American slang. A “sap” was a fool. Schaub was a “rube,” Himmler a “Milquetoast,” Goebbels a “wolf.” Göring considered himself a “he-man.” Money was “scratch” or “jack.” Coffee was “joe.” Whiskey was called “panther sweat.” “Ish kabibble” was what you answered when you couldn’t care less. In America they would both be considered “live wires,” “peaches,” “Janes,” “skirts,” “thrills,” “panics,” “tootsies,” and “hot little numbers.” Emil was Geli’s “sheik”—from the Rudolph Valentino movie—and she was Emil’s “Sheba.”
“And what would Uncle Adolf be?” Geli asked.
“Your ‘sugar daddy,’” he snidely said. But when she asked him what sugar daddy meant, the Herr Doktor told her, “It’s too hard to define.”
And then they were at the Chiemsee where Geli thought the far-off mountains seemed to settle into the lake like white-haired women in green bathing dresses. They parked the Mercedes and the old Daimler under oak trees and Schaub flung out woolen rugs and linen tablecloths from the trunks as Emil carried the crate of Spaten to the shoreline and sloshed out among floundering reeds to submerge the beer underwater for chilling. Leo Raubal filled coffee cups from a vacuum flask as Hoffmann handed out Der Völkische Kurier, the Münchener Neueste Nachrichten, the Münchener Zeitung, and the Wiener Sonn-und-Montag from the stack he’d collected at a Schwabing kiosk that morning, and the six men stood in the shade with tilted heads, silently absorbed in their reading, their filled coffee cups steaming at their shoes or on handkerchiefs on the fenders, their serious newspapers held as wide as the maps of continents.
The craze of nudism, or Freikörperkultur, excited all of Germany in the twenties, and in public parks and on lakes there were generally areas where, as a fitness author put it, “for the benefit of the race, those with high aspirations can steel and train their bodies in the sacredness of their natural condition.” One such beach was on the Chiemsee. Hiding behind a scrim of sloe and scrub bushes, Geli and Henny took off all their clothes and scurried into the lake, screaming as they hit the shallows and fell forward into water that was still so cold it seemed to have teeth. They swam out to a floating dock and hung on to it to find their breath, feeling an aching chill in their feet, and then went farther out toward Men’s Island and the unfinished Sun Palace of Ludwig II, sidestroking back only when Henny’s face was pale with heat loss and her lips were the color of a four-day-old bruise.
And then they lay flat on their backs and naked on the fine, white sand, holding their faces into the flare of the sun, feeling water beads contract on their skin as air flowed over their bodies like cool silk. They heard the men on the other side of the sloe bushes fifty meters away, vying at skimming flat stones on the lake. Geli’s brother seemed to have won with five skips, but then Geli’s uncle, who hated sport, threw a stone that struck the water six times and, with him the victor, the game was determined over.
Henny said, “I was nine years old when I first met him. 1922. I was practicing the piano and hating it and I heard the front doorbell so I went to see who it was. Herr Hitler was on the front step in his slouch hat and shabby white trench coat, a frightening dog whip folded in his hand. I told him my father was taking his afternoon nap upstairs, and he kindly said he’d wait for him. And then he was so charming. We got to talking about the piano, and he stopped my grumbling by sitting down on the bench and playing a Strauss polka. You know how delightful he can be with children.”
Geli shook her head. “I don’t; not really. We hardly knew him then.”
“Well, he is. In fact, I was so flattered by his attention that I polkaed around the room for him, but in a harsher voice he told me to quit and just listen. Then he told me old Teutonic stories about Rhine maidens and an evil dwarf named Alberich, tinkling the piano keys when he talked about fairies and pounding hard on the low notes to indicate trouble and menace. My father woke up before he’d finished his tale and I fell into a sulk. But Herr Hitler promised me he’d stop by on other afternoons when I practiced, and he did, reading his stack of newspapers for an hour or so, then playing a few songs as my reward. That’s when he first called me Sunshine.” With both hands she smoothed her bobbed hair back from her face and crushed water out of it. She asked, “Have you been to the Bayreuth Festival with him yet?”
“No.”
She told Geli he’d taken her there when she was twelve. She’d stayed in the home of Siegfried and Winifred Wagner, and seen Parsifal and Der Ring des Nibelungen.
“Are you trying to make me jealous?”
She smiled. “Well, you get to do everything with him now.”
“I’m his niece.”
“Hah,” Henny said.
“And ‘Hah’ means what?”
“Nothing; never mind.”
A fallen branch was thrown into the Chiemsee, and Geli watched Prinz in full tilt after it, crazily vaulting into the water and crashing through reeds—Phragmites, she thought—before floundering out with the stick in his mouth and shaking furiously. Whoever the thrower was strolled behind them and the Alsatian trotted farther away.
She found she’d hidden her sex with a hand and a forearm. She relaxed. Henny was trying to sleep. Her pinking breasts were the size of sherbet dishes, her fifteen-year-old legs were as hard and lean as a boy’s, a hand was idly brushing sand from her dark pubic hair. Closing her eyes Geli saw redness. She felt a faint trickle of sweat find its way down her side.
Anything was still possible. She fantasized about a future with Emil and four children and a forest cottage in the Wienerwald, south of Wien. Shaded in summer. Safe. In Austria. Or a fine, furnished flat off Grillparzerstrasse in Wien, or between the Stadtpark and the Konzerthaus, with medical offices inside the Ring. With dinners at the Korso or the Three Hussars. She’d be a pediatrician. A veterinarian. Well-off, but not rich. Or she’d offer physical therapy in a fashionable health resort like Semmering. She’d find Aunt Paula a job there. And her mother could cook. In Austria. Maybe her husband would not be Emil but a handsome doctor. Civilized, educated, and kind. With no interest in politics. With friends she admired. She’d have four children and gay dinner parties and season tickets to the opera and a weekend house in the Wienerwald. She’d have friends who were civilized, educated, and kind. She’d sing. She’d be safe. She’d…
She felt Prinz urgently
sniffing her face and realized she’d been dozing. The Alsatian was worried about her, but Hitler called, “Prinz! Heel!” and the hound hurried back to him. Henny frankly displayed herself, as she’d seen her father’s models do, but Hitler averted his head. Geli hunkered forward to hide what she could. She shaded her eyes but couldn’t find her uncle’s face because of the fierce sun behind him. Ambling toward them on the white sand, he was still in his gray flannel suit and yellow tie, but his shoes and socks were off and his trousers were rolled up to his hairless white calves.
With a menacing tone, he said, “Without a stitch on, two pretty girls lie naked in the sun. And whom do they talk about? Me.” And then he grinned. “I should die immediately. Anything else I achieve from now on will only be a disappointment.”
Geli smiled. “You heard us?”
“And watched you,” he said. Tucked under his arm was a sketchbook that he nervously handed to his niece. Geli paged past some older architectural drawings of a future motorway that he’d fantasized being built between München and Salzburg, some sketches of a fantastic university complex on the Chiemsee, as well as an Art Deco restaurant that he’d slashed with an X. And then there she was in fresh pencil, her feet without the difficult detail of toes and her hands without fingers, her face canted to the side and her wild, tawny hair in cascade so that he didn’t have to fail at her features. But her torso was fairly accurate, with the bowls of her breasts flattened slightly over her rib cage, shadows and roundness deftly smudged in with his thumb, her haunches wider than she’d like, and her vulva shockingly correct but then—with embarrassment?—crosshatched to imply pubic hair. She glanced up at her uncle and recognized his fretfulness and diffidence, his fetching vulnerability, his childish need to be rewarded. And now you’re at my mercy, she thought. She flattered him by exclaiming, “But it’s excellent, Uncle Alf!”