§ CHAPTER FIFTEEN §
“Aye?” Romy answered, holding the telephone’s jump rope-like end to her right ear and standing on tiptoe to speak into the mouth piece.
With a clicking sound, Mamie plugged over at the switchboard, and Gideon’s voice came through. “Listen, Romy – it’s Gideon. I have leveraged another engagement for you.”
All her life she had been performing in one way or another in order to stay alive – whether it was before the public or the Nazis. But what else was there for her?
Unemployment was once again skyrocketing. In this time of global financial chaos, the most menial jobs were snapped up. The job of ranch cook was a blessing from heaven, yet in one foolhardy, wistful night she had let her lust for Duke McClellan jeopardize all hope for security.
“Where?”
“It’s next month. At another one of Austin’s German beer gardens, but they’re impressed by word of mouth from Dessau.”
She did not want to take the risk of running into Moe in Austin. Still, she would be grateful if the engagement could help her tuck away pin money for Ireland. “Does it pay anything?”
Evading her question, he said, “Better than that – it is a saengerfest! Singers and groups from as far away as Saint Louis and New Orleans will be providing music for the city’s various beer gardens. It is a way to get your name out there And best of all there is a grand prize – a performance at the Millet Opera House.”
She paused, then asked, “Gideon, why are ye doing this? Helping me out? All along ye’ve made it quite clear I was a pain in yuir arse.”
Now, a hesitation on his end. So unlike him, with his quick repartee. “Well, Romy,” came his attorney’s articulated voice, “you did bail me out of a few close shaves.”
She tested the waters. “What about Miriam? How is it between ye two?”
“Miriam is enchanting.” His treasury of words came more readily now. “Knowledgeable in a multitude of subjects. A powerhouse in Austin politics. We enjoy each other’s company. And, of course, we share the same faith, not to mention her oh-so-dusky beauty delights the eye.”
“The cards saw you two together – and the cards are always right,” Romy flipped back with her stock-in-trade response.
“Always?”
She could imagine him raising a golden-winged brow. “Well, if not, it is because I mayhap could read them wrong. But they, the cards, are never wrong.”
“So, can you make the engagement? It’s at Saengerrunde Hall on Tuesday, April 12th, 6 o’clock prompt.”
“I will have to see if Duke will let me off.”
Come Saturday nights, ranch hands all piled into whoever’s pickup was working in that scarcely populated Blanco county – or else hitchhiked via either vehicle or wagon. But Tuesday afternoons were another animal. Hitchhiking into Austin on a on a long and lonely stretch of county road during the week would be most certainly unreliable.
And on her long and lonely stretch of nights – well, sometimes good was not good enough. So much to be grateful for, aye. It was not her ashes that were drifting over Berlin rooftops. But, Jesus Jehoshaphat Christ, sometimes she just got so bloody tired of trying.
Still, she had to snap out of her funk. She had to summon what Jock called gumption. Everyone in the bunkhouse was long asleep. She rapped on Duke’s office door. It had been three tension-filled weeks since last they had spoken within that confining intimacy of their coupling.
He snapped wide the door. He was wearing only his denims, slung low over hips that were meant for banging home his lust. Inside her. She looked up, up into eyes whose half-mast lids were dampers on the angry heat she suspected flared behind them at the sight of her, clad only in his old shirt.
“Yeah?”
Ever on his guard, he was. “Uhhh, Gideon has arranged for another guitar performance for me. At Saengerrunde Hall.” Her mouth skewed to one side. “Uhh, ye think I might have off that afternoon? It’s on a Tuesday. April 12th.”
His blew air from the side of his mouth, and she knew he was still teetering on banishing her for good.
She rubbed her clasped palms against one another. “I’d, uhh,be willing to make up for the time lost– ye know, working on Sundays for ye, things like that.”
“Things like that?” He braced a forearm high on the door’s edge. “Well, tell me, just what would things like that be, Sunshine?”
She looked down past her bare knees and calves to her feet, wriggled her toes, then glanced back up at him. “Card readings again?”
His hand dropped to grip the knob – and she knew it was all he could do not to slam the door. “Hog wash? Bull shit? Claptrap? I’m not interested in your con games.”
“Unclog me hair balls from yuir bathroom sink?”
His mighty back arched. His head lolled back, as if in exasperation. “All right, you can take the afternoon off.”
She knew she shouldn’t push her luck. Still . . . . “And ye think ye could give me a ride in?”
He stood there, hands on hips, shaking his head. “If your gall don’t beat everything. “Yeah, I’ll take you. Just get the hell out bef – ”
“ – afore you give in to yuir wantin’ to be jumpin’ me bones, here and now, Duke?”
He shoved fingers through his unruly hair, and an exasperated grunt puffed from his lips. “Get it through your thick skull that I don’t want you.”
“Ye want to see me naked right now, do ye not?” Mother Mary, help me. She was on a collision course with becoming a wanton woman. But once you have been bedded by Duke McClellan, all else paled.
He groaned and this time made a move to slam the door, but she piped out, “Why have ye given up searching for a proper-like wife for yuirself? Take me to Austin, and we can still find ye one.”
“I can find a wife on my own, thank you.”
“Aye, most easily, ye can. But, after me, any wife will bloody well bore ye. Still, help ye I will to find the right wife while we’re in Austin.”
She stepped away and gifted him with a Cheshire Cat grin, the last thing visible before the person disappeared – at least, according to “Alice in Wonderland’s” magical talking picture.
He slammed the door.
§ § §
A triple triumphal arch crossed Congress Avenue and Pecan Street. That evening, a torchlight parade was scheduled to snake through it and along Austin’s downtown streets
Prior to the concert, a grand banquet was to be served at Saengerrunde Hall – known also as Scholz’s Garten, the oldest continually operated tavern in Texas.
Hot-air balloon ascensions, marching bands, and military drill teams, plus bowling and other games and amusements were scheduled around the garden’s bubbling spring.
Gideon pulled out his brass pocket watch. He sorely missed his Meisterstück. Gone – thanks to Romy’s derring-do. Twenty minutes of six.
Where the hell was she?
And where was Irina? Had she successfully evaded the SS?
“Do not worry yourself so,” Miriam said. “Romy Sonnenschein is a grown girl and can take care of herself, I assure you. You preoccupy yourself far too much with the refugee.” Reassuringly, she patted his sleeve, her forearm linked with his as they strolled Scholz’s gardens.
Miriam, of course, was right. Why should he be so preoccupied with the Gypsy scammer? True, Romy was out of the ordinary. But were not all con artists? He should know.
He and Miriam wandered beyond the bubbling spring and fountains to the menagerie with bears, deer, alligators and parrots. The two outdoor stages for concerts and plays were in sight just beyond, and the picnic tables, positioned beneath shade trees, were already packed.
Long lines had formed at the two buffet tables. Scholz’s was legendary for its roast beef, jellied fish, herring salad, chili, and every other kind of dish imaginable – plus its desserts. Today, all for .75 cents.
He staked out one of the last vacant tables. “Wait here,” he told Miriam, “and I will get us beer and a platter of food.”
She gave him a heartwarming smile. “I’ll be waiting for you, as always, Gideon.”
He was one lucky man. Miriam was giving and reassuring and dependable. As organized as she was, she was on top of everything. Better than any military commander. Not a needy woman, like Lavinia had been, Miriam provided a loving touch. Best, she had his back.
By contrast, Romy possessed none of those attributes. Where the hell was she? He had put his professional reputation on the line to finalize this gig for the Gypsy scamp.
“There ye be,” came Romy’s voice, a genie summoned by rubbing a lamp. And having her back was the towering McClellan.
Gideon nodded up at him, then barked at Romy, “You have five minutes to check in at Stage Two!”
She flashed him that megawatt grin. “Got it, Gideon Goldman.” And then she and the tall Texan were swallowed up by the influx of the evening’s spectators.
He was chagrinned by her lackadaisical approach to life, but should he have expected anything different?
However, her performance that evening was anything but lackadaisical. Passionate, powerful, vibrant. Delivered with unimaginable fire and vitality.
Now he could understand why Romani were celebrated for their musical heritage. They had influenced jazz, bolero, flamenco music, even classical composers like Franz Liszt. Most likely, the next day the Austin Daily Statesman would dutifully report on Romy Sonnenschein’s great technique, flair, and progression of her performance.
What a loss; they would know nothing about the wild, vagabond spirit behind it all.
§ § §
Romy finished her performance with her signature song, “Lost in Your Smile”, to thunderous applause.
Stashing Arturo’s borrowed guitar in its banged-up case – she really needed to save enough money to buy her own guitar – her cheap jewelry tinkled out her fraud. Gypsies loved opulence. And she flaunted it, because that was what was expected of her.
She groped her way offstage, behind the curtains. But where she would have descended the three-step staircase, Moe blocked her way. Was it fate that he invariably turned up at the gateway between heaven and hell? As below, so above?
Stubby arms folded across his barrel chest, he said, “Well, now, why did I not receive a gold-scripted invitation to your performance tonight?”
Her grip on the case handle tightened. She drew a steadying breath. “Moe, I told ye I canna help ye. Ye have more ready access to him than I do, what with your Jewish Relief work here in Austin.”
His mouth, large in proportion to the rest of his body, stretched like a rubber band about to snap close. “It’s not about helping me. It’s about helping yourself. A kapo at Sachsenhausen has suddenly recalled where he saw you before.”
She refused to let him see her quake. “Tis sure I am his memory was joggled by yuir miserable self.”
His rubber-band mouth stretched wider. “Now that Colonel Klauffen knows you are alive, he would naturally be interested in your brother – and you – again. You know, interrogations, examinations, inquisitions, those kinds of things.”
Her skin shriveled. German spy rings were known to be operating in the States, and the radio had recently announced German saboteurs had been apprehended before they could explode a bomb on Niagara Falls.
Her Gypsy folk lived according to the unwritten rules of the road. Knew to avoid rats. Knew to wash your hand before you ate. Knew not to take the last piece of pie. Knew that pearls and gold must be real.
Her clan knew the law of the land. Knew not to make eye contact with the Nazis. Knew that the wealthy made the laws. Knew that those laws did not protect people like her, living in poverty.
Her clan also knew that bride kidnapping, whether in Ireland or Czechoslovakia, was a good way to avoid a bride price. Knew that virginity was essential to an unmarried woman.
So, she knew, given her virginal status or lack thereof, that she could not depend upon Duke for protection. And it was a given that she could not depend upon the law. Any law. Anywhere. It all came down to class distinction.
Thus, she summoned her skimpy courage and focused her meanest hypnotic glare on the little man. “What swampy muck did ye worm yuir way out of, Moishe Klein?”
At her use of his real name, his troll’s face reddened. “Soon, maybe a matter of months, Hitler’ll snap close his mouse trap – and I will, too.”
At the bottom of the stairs, just behind Moe, appeared Duke’s formidable frame. “Keller, isn’t it? Moe Keller. Not sure what that threat you just made is about, but harm her in any way, and I’ll stomp a mudhole in your misshapen self.”
Moe bristled like a porcupine, but Duke elbowed him aside and offered her a hand of assistance to descend the three steps.
Three steps that might make a difference of a lifetime. Ignoring Moe’s belligerent countenance, she placed her palm in the tentative safety of Duke’s engulfing one.
Without sounding jolly ridiculous, the air seemed charged with something she had never felt anywhere else. How they reached his pickup, which took a goodly fifteen minutes of threading through the crowd that surged around them, like water around a boulder, and next wending through the parked vehicles – including everything from jalopies to flatbed wagons to bicycles – she never could recollect.
What she was distinctly aware of was the shocking electrical current flashing in the dark around her and Duke, like a multitude of fireflies. He opened the pickup’s door, and his hand at her elbow, boosting her up inside, created an explosion of molecules, atoms, and universes.
If there existed any romantic inclination about her, it insisted that this extraordinary sensation was a result of the combustible union of their energy, resulting from that unforgettable night of surprising yearning, of the soul’s straining, to connect beyond mere copulation.
But then a belief in romance and courtly love and happy-ever-after fairy tales had never been her strong suit. Practical demands always interfered.
As if negotiating Austin’s heavy traffic on Saturday nights on Sixth Street demanded his full attention, Duke said nothing.
And neither did she, not when the air in the rattletrap Ford was heavy with her wanting. A wanting bankrupted by so many things that would never be said. Important things. Like, I have never felt like this before. Like, Tis splintering I am when you come into the room. When me stomach crashes, and me knees falter. These feelings take me by surprise. Do you feel them, too?
Once on the highway back to the S&S, the mortar-like set to his squared-off jaw indicated he was not in the mood for her usual repartee.
At last, just past the S&S wrought-iron, arched entryway, he eased back somewhat into the dirty gray wool seat and glanced over at her. “Wanna tell me what happened back there, between you and that damned dwarf?”
Looking anywhere but at him, she fiddled with her purse clasp. “As they say in those mob movies, Moe’s got the goods on me.”
“Because you entered the U.S. on false papers? Because you are not Jewish? Or did you break other laws back in Germany, as well?”
Despite the moonlight, it was too dark to see the grassy fields and tree leaves and crops that were shooting from the earth that spring, but she knew they were a youthful pale green. While she felt very old.
“Back in Germany, I have a brother. The Nazi doctors were elated when we two were swooped up from a street performance. Not only were we Gypsies, we were twins. Fifteen-years-olds. And Luca was gay. What better experimental subjects?”
“Jesus Christ!” He brought the pickup to a stop in front of the barn. Switching shut the ignition, he shifted his lengthy frame on the bench seat so that they faced off. “Go ahead.”
“Ye see, all the ghouls’ notes and preliminary examinations and interviews were blown to bits when I escaped after that first experiment, leaving them with only me brother. And, of course, they would be delighted if I were to be returned to Sachsenhausen’s labs. Moe was one of their stoolies – he remembers me from there.”
She slid him a sidewise glance. She dreaded what other questions, personal questions as probing as surgical instruments, he might ask.
He didn’t. He lapped a hand around the back of her neck and the other around her waist and hauled her across the split upholstered seat onto his lap.
Trapped between his chest and the steering wheel, she buried her face in the cradle of his neck and wide shoulder. “I willna let ye make me cry again, Duke McClellan,” she mumbled.
“Hell, sweetheart, I’ll cry for you if you want me to.”
Giving that some thought, she said, “I think I’d rather ye kiss me.”
“Asking for trouble again, are you?” His next words rumbled out like summer thunder, concealing that slight speech impediment that occurred when he was on unfamiliar ground. “You have to know that if you have it in your head to stay on at the S&S, Sunshine, I can’t help but try to cover you.”
Her heart was jangling like a tambourine. She had a solid idea of what he meant by covering, in the breeding sense of the word. But for her, cover, his covering, meant his large body sheltering hers, protecting her from all harm. To hold her and to hide her. Her body guard. Always beside her. If only.
“Aye.” That one-word acquiescence yielded to whatever he was asking of her.
He tucked his jaw in order to look down at her, his gaze locking on hers. “Are you safe? You know what I mean. Are you in the breeding time?”
At that, she laughed. Laughter that scoffed at her, him, the whole crazy world. “Ye dunna want any Gypsy-tainted bastards running around, do ye now? Oh, I am bloody well safe. As a start, the Nazis sterilized me female parts. Like an old woman drying up these past five years, me monthlies are . . . well, months and months go by . . . . ”
She left off, not adding that there was nothing to indicate she was a nubile woman except the occasional spotting and that pervasive wetness generated by this raging craving for him.
In the near dark, his eyes flared. Then they narrowed, scoring her features intently, one by one, as if studying tracks for clues as to what kind of critter had made them and when. But his words were infinitely gentle. “Now’s not the time to hold back, Romy. How did it happen, this . . . ,” his voice thickened, “ . . . this sterilization?”
She counterfeited a shrug of nonchalance but bit her lower lip to stop its trembling. Her words came out rather garbled. “The doctors, they make ye stand between their two x-ray machines. Me innards burned terribly afterwards. Luca, me brother, had it worse. They removed his bollocks.”
“God Awmighty,” he muttered.
Her face cracked with a fallacious grin. “Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals . . . we were not of the master race, ye see.”
Strangely, it hadn’t been the outrageous acts of the Nazi inhumanity but the rest of humanity’s silence she continued to find outrageous.
Oh, God, what if she went weak and blubbered again? Time for the stiff upper lip and all. Criminy, she had been doing that her whole life; she could do it now. “There isna a day that passes that I dunna feel guilt. Guilt that I escaped after that first time – and Luca dinna.”
His large hands framed her face, forcing her defiant eyes to meet his smoky ones. “Listen to me, Romy. If you want to stay on at the S&S, I’ll make sure you’re safe from people like Moe and Nazi doctors, if I have to build a goddamn wall to keep the world out”
She couldn’t hide the sadness from her smile. “But not safe from yuirself?”
He stared at her for a long moment, at her eyes, her mouth, then her eyes again. He shook his head, as if to clear it. “If that’s what you want. Yes, myself included.”
This time her grin was genuine, and she cooed softly in her best Judy Garland voice, “’Gimme, gimme, what I cry for. Ye know ye got the kind of lovin’ I’d die for.’”
“You’re one of a kind, Sunshine,” he said, shaking his head, but she had coaxed a smile from him.
So intent he appeared to be on achieving his goals for the S&S and all that they entailed, including a wife and bairns, that it seemed to her he rarely allowed himself the luxury of a smile; but, Sweet Baby Jesus, when he did, that slow smile that began with the slight tilt to the ends of his mustache – well, he could drop a lass in her tracks.
Best of all, though, when he smiled like that, it made up for all the words he didn’t say, all the words she wanted to hear.
Well, almost, made up for their lack, but she would take whatever crumbs he offered.