The Wicked: A Love Story

Eleven

Night Reading

Let my servants be few & secret: they shall rule the many & the known.

-The Book of the Law

He had thought of calling Marabeth. She had simply told Jim, “Tonight, when you read, you’re going to find some interesting stuff.”

And Marabeth never put irony into her voice when she said the word “interesting.” Jim Strauss just knew that when she used certain words she meant certain things, and from what he had already read, he understood what was to come.

The Book of Pamela Strauss

WHEN THE WAR BEGAN, there was a tenseness that settled over us. No one said anything, but we all drew together. Germantown consisted of many different people, the Catholics, the Lutherans and yes, the Jews, not to mention the black population that spanned us and the area some called Little Hungary. We waited, and often Mr. Keller and Friederich spent nights in the large living rooms of the house on Dimler or the house on Williams, loading their guns and gathering their sons and the men who worked for them to form into mini militias.

But the riots did not come. The police came. The government came. They took the Grubers and Schweitzers away. They took the first generation families, and I wondered if they would try and take us. I was not worried for myself and certainly not for Friederich, though he was no longer young. But what if they tried to take Claire or Maris or Jimmy? And now that we had found what we were politely calling “the medicine” for Jimmy, what if he should get off that, be separated from it? What untold horrors could happen?

But as usual, I need never have worried about the things I feared, and the things worth worrying about, I could never have foreseen.

I had begun observing my brother and Steiger, and in the house they made movements and gestures, strange, but familiar, as if they were playing at joining the military. When, one night, Friederich made some comment about both the boys being more orderly, I assumed that this meant they truly were headed for the military, after all, they were going off to secret meetings and returning with a mixture of giddiness and manly pride I had never seen. One night, after they had left, I looked down from my window and decided to follow them.

I went up Dimler, then turned down Hull, which used to be Holstein and which people in the neighborhood had begun calling Holstein again no matter what the street sign said, and then, in the shadow of Saint Ursula, reaching Noble Street, I saw that there were others, mostly very young men, going into Youth Hall. It wasn’t a place for women and certainly not middle aged—as you would call it now—women, so I’d had no use for it. But with caution and an invisibility taught me by Frau Inga and helped by Augustus, I made my way across the street and to the side of the building, climbing onto a crate to look into the windows, and feeling foolish.

Deutschland, wach auf aus deinem Albtraum!

Nein, der Ort für fremde Juden in deinem Königreich!

Wir wollen für deine Auferstehung kämpfen!

Arisches Blut wird nicht zugrunde gehen!

Zu all diesen Heuchlern werfen wir sie aus,

Juda: verlasse unser deutsches Haus!

Wenn das Terroir gelöscht und sauber ist,

wir werden vereint und glücklich sein!

Wir sind die NSDAP-Kämpfer

fällt deutsch im Herzen

im festen und hartnäckigen Kampf.

Wir haben uns dem Hakenkreuz geweiht.

Sei gegrüßt, unser Fahrer: Heil Hitler!

Now, it was German, my Marabeth, but you do not have to be German to understand what was being said, and as these boys, for they were boys, removed their coats, they were all wearing red armbands with that nasty little symbol the chancellor in Germany loved so much. I had seen them before. To be sure, we all had, and there were Jimmy and Steiger, singing away, in German, though I will translate:

Germanyawaken from your evil dream!
Do not give room to foreign Jews in your kingdom!
We want to fight for your resurrection!
Aryan blood should not be lost!

All these hypocrites, we throw them out,
Judah escapes from our German house!
Once the floe is cleared and clean,
we will be united and happy!

We are the fighters of the NSDAP
oath of loyalty in the heart, firm in the fight and tough.
We surrender to the swastika.
Hail our guide, Heil Hitler!

I had counted on Jimmy being weak. I had counted on him being frail. I had counted on him being, yes, a werewolf. And I had counted on being able to cure it. I had not counted on my little brother being a Nazi.

TELLING FRIEDERICH can only make it worse. The truth is, I have no idea what the old man would say. So Jimmy goes on with his meetings, but I am more troubled by Steiger. After all, Jimmy was always a fool, but Steiger falling in with him is a source almost of anger to me. And then there was the hypocrisy of it all, and I do not claim to be any sort of saint, but the Nazis hated everyone. They hated the Blacks they had never met as much as they hated the Jews, and I, in my own way, had come to have a great love and reverence for Augustus Dunharrow, the man who had taught me so much, and for the people from whom he came. Like many a white person in that time, while Jimmy and Steiger openly espoused what in this time is called racism but in those days was just the order of things, they went together to the jazz clubs, sneaking in and out of parties on the other side of Main Street where most of the Negroes lived.

They were always together.

The war seemed as if it would never end. At first we hoped it would be over in a matter of months, but it continued, and by 1944, Jimmy and Steiger were both talking about joining the army. Maris and Claire were weeping at the table every night because the Keller brothers, their sweethearts, had gone off to fight. We all had it in our heads that no one we knew would be harmed, but then Abel Steiglitz’s son was shot down in France, and we began to walk more carefully, be a little more brittle, light more candles at Saint Ursula.

And speaking of candles, and of church, 1944 was the year that Forger’s Row caught fire. It isn’t far from the river, and now it is a lovely neighborhood with large stylish houses, but back then it was rows of old factories, and many of them had been co opted for the making of ammunitions. It was surrounded by tenements, and the fire blazed for days. But it was not only the tenements and factories which exploded and painted the sky red. Old Saint Patrick’s Cathedral burned, exploded and collapsed in on itself.

Instantly the diocese was in an uproar. What would they do? There was no money to rebuilt Saint Pat’s. They would have to name an extant church, and so the Polish suggested their Saint Stanislaus, and the Irish suggested another one of their churches, Saint Mary’s. This was promptly shot down, though it was more a matter of racial politics than anything. Saint Mary’s, in all honesty, would have been the best church. The Italians suggested Saint Francis and we put up Saint Ursula’s while the Blacks never even suggested Saint Agatha. Sometimes I feel it was because they knew politics was against them, but other times I think, especially since the power of the Dunharrows was behind that church, that they simply wanted Agatha to remain theirs. The rest of us did not have as much sense, and the debate went on for not as long as you might think. The bishop was a cousin of the Dashbachs, and he had grown up in the northern part of Germantown, close to downtown. Before the year was over, it was declared that Saint Ursula would be the new cathedral until later, after the war, when they would build a new one.

That never happened.

Saint Ursula was beautiful, but in a way also far from my mind and, at any road, Saint Agatha had come to mean more to me, so as excited as my younger sisters were about the event, my mind turned to other things. It was one day while I was in the house and thinking I was alone, that I pricked my ears, listening to the settling of floorboards. But, no, not the settling of floorboards at all. Something else. A sighing. I rose and I felt the settling of age in my hips. This wasn’t the first time. I was not young anymore. Slipping off my shoes, I went out of my room, and slid down the darkened hallway. It was late afternoon, and I heard sighing and moaning, and I knew, but did not know what I heard. I knew the sound, but did not know how it could be. There were only so many people in the house. For a moment I thought of how, years ago, there had been servants in the empty top floor, and how those days were gone. But today, the top floor was not empty, and so I went up. Perhaps lust was in me, and coming down the hall, I quietly pushed open the door of the room nearest the little kitchenette.

My eyes observed it all, bodies writhing together, twisting, striving, hands in hair, kissing rubbing, sighing in the dim pale light of the dying day. I stood there and watched in mingled pleasure and horror as they grasped each other, making love, as Jimmy’s hands were like claws on Steiger’s back, as Steiger rose up and tried to be quiet while he stifled his orgasm. They were lovers. I imagined they always had been.

Heart racing, I turned away and pressed my back to the wall, listening to them whisper, listening to the bed creak as their bodies shifted. Now, I have seen many things, and as I grow older and the world changes. I see in our own neighborhood men and men, women and women, happy. But I now know what the ancient fear was, what the hatred has been. For I felt a very simple fear at that moment. If they continued on this way, then the Strauss line would die. So I resolved to find a way to cure Jimmy of Steiger, to take Steiger from his friend as quickly as possible and hopefully find him a woman too. It would require my greatest magic, and up until then, my greatest sacrifice.