Fraulein Frankenstein

  Whatever unnatural advantages I possessed in my education, I was speaking rudimentary German and demanding lessons in reading and writing from my hosts within a fortnight. But they taught me far more than simple school lessons—far more than they intended.

  Although I could see the most obvious differences in appearance and dress between men and women, it did not occur to my child’s mind that the sexes were distinct beings or that they interacted in any way other than the commonplace acts of eating, sleeping, working, or conversing. I certainly did not think a female anatomy that I did not even choose would ultimately determine my destiny.

  Yet I noticed a closeness between Birgit and Pastor Georg that they didn’t exhibit with their parishioners. When I first began staying with them, they maintained a stiff, self-conscious propriety in my presence, but as they became accustomed to me they touched hands frequently, exchanged secretive smiles, and whispered endearments.

  One morning, just before Pastor Georg left for the church, he pressed his mouth to Birgit’s with a disgusting slurping sound, as if trying to chew the lips from her face. I watched, nauseated, from the hallway. As soon as he’d gone out the door, I rushed forward to tug at Birgit’s elbow.

  “What is? What is?” I imitated the repulsive sucking noise.

  Birgit glance from my face to where Pastor Georg had just stood and back again, either unsure what I was asking or unable to believe I did not already know the answer. Then she let out a laugh.

  “Why, that’s a kiss, of course! It’s how Georg shows his love for me.” She stared, expecting some sign of comprehension from me. “Haven’t you ever been kissed, Liesl? Liesl?”

  I ran back to my room and slammed the door. My head reeled from a mixture of confusion and a blistering new emotion for which I had no word: embarrassment.

  I stood before the mirror and made the squidlike pucker of a “kiss” to my reflection. How could one possibly want such a thing? But Birgit had spoken of a kiss as if it were a delight, seemed to pity me for never having had one. She said it was a sign of something else I did not have, another word whose meaning was unfathomable to me.

  Love.

  #

  Before long, I received an even more vulgar—and less welcome—demonstration of “love.”

  Having gone to bed early one evening, I again squirmed in the clutches of a nightmare, a confabulation of real memory and horrible imagining. The Goliath from the laboratory reached for my naked body with cold, greedy hands.

  Mine, it said.

  Its obsidian eyes fixed on me in a covetous stare, its bluish lips bunching to claim a kiss. As the simian arms enfolded me, the massive mouth swelled in my vision until it seemed a bottomless gullet that would swallow me whole. I shrieked and levered upright in bed, panting and perspiring.

  Now awake, I heard more shrieks, as if the dream were still ringing in my ears. But no . . . Birgit’s voice shrilled, not mine.

  I thought there must have been a real horror going on in the house.

  I rose and padded to the kitchen on tiptoe, stifling exclamations of surprise and pain as I banged into furniture in the dark. Fumbling to locate the candlestick on the table, I lit the taper with a spill I ignited from the smoldering coals in the cooking fire, as I had seen Birgit do. She was still squealing like a sow impaled on a spit as I grabbed a poker from the hearth as a weapon and crept to the bedchamber upstairs.

  The sounds from within the room grew worse—a sickening slapping of flesh, punctuated by Birgit’s yelps and a rough, porcine snorting.

  She’s being beaten, I thought.

  Choking up my grip on the poker, I pressed the door’s latch down with my knuckles and pushed the door open with my foot. As I thrust the candle into the room, the taper sloshed yellow light over the hairy flabbiness of an aging man’s bare back, buttocks, and flanks. As I raised the poker to strike, the man on the bed rolled to one side and looked back at me, puffing, his cheeks red from either exertion or humiliation.

  It was Pastor Georg.

  Beneath him lay Birgit, equally nude, equally mortified. She had stopped squealing and now only wheezed, aghast. I took little notice of her, however, for I could not tear my gaze from the pastor. It was the first time I had seen him without his clerical vestments, the first time I had seen any man unclothed.

  “Liesl? What . . . what . . .” Stammering, he withdrew from Birgit, and his . . . his appendage drooped in sorry defeat.

  I dropped the poker and backed out into the hall. Hobbling out of bed, Pastor Georg flustered into the first garment he could get hold of—his cassock, which he shrugged on without buttoning. The robe still afforded glimpses of the profane beneath the sacred, and the minister reeked of sweat and secretion as he came after me.

  “Liesl!” he cried, commanding, pleading. “It is not what you think. We are Lutherans. Birgit is my wife.”

  He must have misinterpreted my disgust as Catholic indignation at the sins of an uncelibate priest. I had little conception of God, much less the differences in doctrine between Christian sects, so his explanations made no sense to me.

  A nightshirt now wrapped around her, Birgit timidly emerged from the bedchamber to stand behind the minister.

  I glared at the two of them. “What is? What is?”

  Pastor Georg put his arm around Birgit, placed a hand on her breastbone. “Wife.My wife.” He moved the hand to his own chest. “Husband. I’m her husband.”

  I waved the candle in Birgit’s direction, accusing. “You—you hurt.”

  The minister shook his head and smiled. “No, no, she is not hurt. See?”

  He gestured to his wife, who smiled sheepishly in affirmation.

  “Love between man and woman is a gift from God.” The pastor chuckled. “Even for a man of the cloth.”

  He extended a paternal hand toward me but relented when I flinched away. “Someday, you will understand,” he promised.

  I nodded only so that I could get away from him and go back to my room. My wife. Something about those words brought back the memory of the monster’s huge hands, its needy grasping as it moved toward me. I shuddered. In reality, I understood nothing of man and woman, husband and wife. I did not think I ever would.

  #

  After my wounds had scabbed and sealed, Birgit took a pair of delicate sewing scissors and snipped each of my stitches. “I may not be much of a surgeon,” she remarked, gently tugging loose threads free from my skin, “but I’m as good a seamstress as you’re likely to find.”

  As the black scabs flaked away, they left thick, whitish scars that slithered around my joints and throat like nightcrawlers. Birgit insisted that I keep them covered at all times, required me to wear either scarves or high-collared dresses to hide my neck. I also learned to tolerate the perpetual constriction of shoes and cumbersome layers of undergarments.

  When I had mastered enough manners and speech not to arouse unwanted attention, Pastor Georg deemed me proper enough to work with them in the Stadtkirche as a charwoman. There, in the church, I received yet another lesson in the ritual mysteries of marriage, and from a most unexpected source.

  The well-dressed man named Frankenstein lurked constantly in the shadowed corridors of my dreams, but during my waking hours I’d had little cause or desire to dwell on him. Only a few times after I learned to speak did Pastor Georg awkwardly attempt to broach the subject.

  “Liesl,” he would begin after much hemming and hawing, “if there’s anything you wish to tell us about the night you came to us . . . anything about Baron Frankenstein . . .”

  As soon as he mentioned the name, I trembled so piteously that he abandoned the topic at once. My fear, while well-founded, was not entirely genuine. I could not have said why I dissembled in order to protect a man who’d tried to kill me, except that Baron Frankenstein was the only person who knew the truth of my existence. I sensed somehow that, if I bore witness against him, I might never have the opportunity to ask him who I was or how I came to be.

&nb
sp; The chance that I would ever get such an opportunity seemed slight at best. I was nothing but a housemaid, he a reclusive nobleman who hadn’t visited the city in more than a month. I had no reason to hope our paths would ever cross again, much less to think that we would meet again in the very church where I now swept the nave.

  One afternoon, I was whisking my broom in the octagonal chapel when Frankenstein opened the front door, removing his hat as he leaned inside. Recognizing him at once, I spun around and swept up the center aisle in the opposite direction so he would not see my face.

  Fortunately, the Baron did not seem to recognize me now that I no longer wore stitches and bandages. “You there!” he called. “Where is the minister?”

  I kept at my cleaning, pretending not to hear.

  “Girl! Are you deaf? Where is your master?”

  Pastor Georg hurried forward to intercede. “I am here. How may I help you, Baron?”

  Curiosity compelled me to look, and I maneuvered between the pews so that I could watch from the corner of my eye. My stomach knotted, for I was convinced he’d returned for me.

  Frankenstein had other business, however. He had not come alone. He held the door for his companion—a slim, prim-looking young woman in a fashionable-yet-modest gown, her dark hair bound in a bun but for ringlets that fell over her ears. She had a round, pleasant face and a faint smile that shone with good-natured amusement.

  Frankenstein, by contrast, bore a funereal frown, even in such charming company. “May I present my fiancée Elizabeth Lavenza?” he announced to the pastor with impatient formality. “We must have our wedding here in the Stadtkirche, immediately. Every moment we delay may part us forever.”

  CHAPTER 5

  WEDDING NIGHT

  I could almost feel the tension in Pastor Georg’s neck muscles as he strained to avoid glancing in my direction. “Are you certain, Baron?” he asked, nonplussed. “So soon after your mother—”

  “My family’s misfortunes are nothing to you,” Frankenstein replied.

  I would later learn that Victor Frankenstein had lost several of his closest relations and friends in tragic and mysterious circumstances over the past few weeks.

  Pastor Georg became flustered, sought to placate the nobleman. “We would be honored, of course. But such a distinguished event will require preparation. If you could give us a few weeks—”

  The Baron remained adamant. “It must be no later than tomorrow.”

  Elizabeth nudged her groom-to-be in gentle remonstrance. “Victor, have patience! Surely we can wait . . .”

  “No. I cannot.” He took her hand in his in the first gesture of real tenderness I had ever seen him display. “The only thing left that I want from this life is to be wed to you. Please . . . don’t deny me that.”

  Behind their spectacles, his eyes deepened with such desolation that I almost pitied the man. What, I wondered, could have caused the stone of his heart to crumble so?

  Elizabeth’s smile faded. “You know there is nothing I want more than to marry you,” she assured him. “Tomorrow it shall be, then.”

  He kissed her hand, holding it to his lips as if afraid it might disappear.

  The intensity of the moment discomfited Pastor Georg. “Well . . . I suppose I’d better get to work. Will four o’clock in the afternoon be acceptable for the ceremony?”

  Victor Frankenstein recovered himself somewhat, although his gaze remained glassy. “Oh . . . yes. That will be fine. Thank you.”

  The Baron and his intended took their leave of the pastor, who strode off to seek Birgit’s help for the preparations. I hastened to the front door of the church in order to peek out at Frankenstein as he helped Elizabeth into a carriage that waited for them in the plaza. He darted a glance over his shoulder, and for a moment I was afraid he might have seen me.

  He continued to scan the square, as if wary of being spied upon. He was about to enter the coach himself when he spotted something atop a house across the square that made him freeze.

  I traced the trajectory of his gaze up to a dormer window on the roof of a three-story home. The sun had set behind the building, reddening the sky and blurring details of the slanted shingles into a single black plane of shadow. But there seemed to be an irregular figure that straddled the peak of the dormer—a splotch of silhouette with bunched shoulders and a massive, misshapen head.

  Then the figure crouched lower and blended into the rooftop’s dusky penumbra . . . if, in fact, it had been there at all. None of the townspeople who traipsed across the sparsely populated square had noticed it. Only Victor Frankenstein and I saw its lurking presence.

  The Baron’s posture drooped as he climbed into the carriage beside his fiancée. I nearly ran after the coach as it trundled off toward the castle on the hill outside town. If that prowling shadow got to Frankenstein before I did, I’d never get the answers I so desperately wanted.

  Tomorrow, I thought. He’ll be back tomorrow . . . and then I’ll make him tell me who I am.

  #

  Even for a peasant, the wedding the following day would have been considered modest. For a nobleman like Baron Victor Frankenstein, it must have seemed a social fiasco. On such short notice, hardly any of the couple’s immediate family or friends were able to reach the city in time. All but the first few pews in the Stadtkirche remained empty. To help fill the seats, Frankenstein had cajoled the town’s pear-shaped burgomaster and a few of the more sycophantic businessmen into attending the ceremony. The sole groomsman was the old servant, Hans, who’d tried to help his master prevent my escape from the castle.

  Frankenstein’s servants festooned the altar and apse with a scant supply of fresh flowers they had purchased in town.

  “Not enough,” I heard Frankenstein mutter as he inspected their handiwork prior to the ceremony. He gestured to some handsome flower arrangements that the domestics had put aside while they placed the new flowers. The blossoms were all white, draped with night-black crepe.

  “Not those, Master!” gasped Hans.

  “Yes, those,” Frankenstein snapped. “And quickly!”

  From a distance, I watched as the servants hastily removed the black ribbons and refurbished the bouquets with white lace. I heard Birgit clucking her tongue behind me. “To think that the Baron would use his own mother’s funeral flowers at his wedding!”

  “Hush, Birgit,” said Pastor Georg. “We have much to do.”

  I knew an important event had occurred in the church a few days before, but I’d had no opportunity to ask what had brought all the townsfolk to church on a weekday, or so darkly dressed. Birgit had assigned me the task of cleaning the house, as she always did when there was any chance I might attract too much attention. I did not know the word “funeral.” And I couldn’t have guessed just how soon I would discover what it really meant.

  Unable to procure a full choir to sing the wedding liturgy on a day when most of his parishioners were tending their shops or plowing their fields, Pastor Georg settled for only two choristers—one a young boy, the other an elderly widow. Their thin, high voices wavered, hollow and forlorn, in the cavernous Stadtkirche as the wedding began.

  Hiding behind one of the pillars in the transept, I watched the ritual unfold. Though the paltry congregation feigned gaiety as Elizabeth walked down the aisle toward her groom, I sensed their superstitious dread. Elizabeth wore white, her waist encircled by a wide, black velvet sash. The costume reminded me of the pallid flowers with their streamers of black crepe. The bride’s face looked pale, yet serene.

  Victor Frankenstein himself appeared distant, distracted. He mumbled his vows, his gaze wandering from the bride to scan the empty benches at the back of the church, as if expecting to find an uninvited guest seated there—perhaps a looming, leering shadow like the one perched on the rooftop the previous day.

  The sole glimmer of joy in the service came from Elizabeth. Despite Frankenstein’s dolor, she clasped his hand in both of hers and smiled. “I take you, Victor, to be
my husband from this day forward,” she recited with fervid passion. “To join with you, and to share all that is to come. And I promise to be faithful to you as long as we both shall live.”

  She glowed with such rapture that I found myself envying her, even though she was marrying a man I loathed and feared. I suddenly felt bereft, a void gaping within me where none had been a moment before. Was this that intangible ideal state called “love”?

  Little in the way of celebration followed the ceremony. The baron apologized to his guests for not providing a dinner and vowed to host them all for a proper feast at a future date. The newlyweds accepted tepid congratulations from the townsfolk, then departed for Castle Frankenstein, attended by Elizabeth’s lady’s maid and Hans.

  As I watched the wedding party’s carriages rattle up the road that led out of the city, my gaze flicked again to the roof of the house across the square. No shadow straddled the dormer’s peak.

  Its absence did not calm the sense of urgency that agitated me. Quite the opposite. If the monster was not at the wedding, where was it . . . and what might it do next?

  I wanted to go after the baron immediately but could not find a way to abscond unnoticed from Birgit and Pastor Georg. I lost a precious hour sweeping up rose petals strewn like dead butterflies along the church’s center aisle, fretting every moment that the creature might deprive me forever of my chance to confront Frankenstein.

  It was dinnertime before I finally finished my chores at the Stadtkirche. Though famished, I told Birgit that I wasn’t hungry and wanted to go to bed early.

  “It’s the baron, isn’t it?” She nodded knowingly, and I was afraid she’d guessed my true intention. Then she patted my shoulder and walked me to my room. “It must have upset you terribly to have him around. I hope you know that if he weren’t a nobleman, we would never have allowed him in our church. It was sweet of you not to say anything to spoil the wedding. Go and rest now—you won’t ever have to see him again. I promise.”