The Wicked: A Love Story

You mustn’t believe that I felt bad about the turn things had taken or, at least, I did not feel as bad as one would expect. My main feeling was surprise, surprise that I could have such feelings for James, or for what I encountered with him in the night. Friederich, in his increasing old age and meanness, did not ask many questions. Katherine knew nothing. In the course of time I brought four other women to the house, making with them the same trade as I had with the first. So I had five forms into which I changed, though the transformations were not full, and after a while they were only little more than glamours. In the early morning I felt a special and indescribable way about Jimmy, but he was still Jimmy, my sixteen year old brother, though I could see traces of the man in him. I reminded myself that, in the end, he thought he was with a whore, with several whores. He had no idea as he made love to me with increasing skill, that I was the austere older sister he had always half feared. In the nights that went on for three years, as I surrendered to his mouth sucking my nipples, biting me, his hands tracing the sides of my aging body, as he began to teach me things, burying his face between my thighs and pleasuring me in ways that had been gone for me for so long, I reminded myself that in no real sense were we lovers.

Almost as soon as the war ended, and the Keller boys were home, my sisters married. Claire said, a little ungraciously, that since Maris was the oldest, she should marry first. To be sure, Maris was only twenty-two at the time, but in those days people thought this was approaching spinsterhood. She had enrolled in Wallington College, partially, I know, because she thought she might be an old maid and she wanted a profession. She did what I had never done, and dropped out without even earning her degree. Even with the beer factory closed, the Strausses were still a family of means, Katherine Dashbach’s fortune had seen to that, and the early spring of 1946 saw a lavish wedding at Saint Ursula’s for Maris and Peter Keller. Later that year, near the autumn, Claire married Peter’s brother Andrew, and Katherine said, looking meaningfully across the church to young Natalie and her sisters, “Well, three is not a crowd in this case. Three is exactly how it should be.”

     I did not see the look on Steiger’s face. Once I had begun coming to Jimmy, I did not wonder about his relationship to his old friend. It was not that I believed that the sex I gave Jimmy had driven him from Steiger. It was only that, now that he could be with a woman, would be with a woman, whatever happened between him and Steiger did not matter. Perhaps I told myself they grew out of it. I didn’t know, but as it had always been almost set in stone that Jimmy would marry Natalie, I thought it best to go about finding someone for Steiger.

     “You are a very nosey woman, Pamela,” my father said. “It is enough we find someone for Jimmy.”

     But Katherine said, “Pamela is kind, and she is right. I have a cousin. It would be a nice thing if we made it official, you know, Steiger’s tie to the family.”

     Friederich, though, was so concerned about Natalie marrying Jimmy, that I didn’t have to worry about it. In 1946, Jimmy was just turning eighteen. He was tall, handsome in a very slender way, golden in skin and hair, with a part down his scalp. He was still inseparable from Steiger, who had a more robust and golden beauty beside Jimmy’s bronze and boylike looks. We had invited Natalie over for tea and Katherine set up white gardenias in the living room. The curtains were open to bring in sunlight from Dimler Street, and there she was, at the door, her hair almost black, her eyes wide and always a little, not sarcastic, but careful. She reminded me not so much of Frau Inga, as a wolf, as someone with Inga’s blood. Looking at this American girl, I thought of the old bent over witch in the woods in Bavaria, her great grandmother who had loved and nursed me so long ago.

“I’m told we’re supposed to be married,” Natalie said as she put a cake onto her plate.

     You could have heard a pin drop as she sat there in her chair on the other side of the parlor table from Jimmy.

     “Of course,” Natalie spread jam on the cake, “I don’t really even know you.”

     She looked around the high walls of the living room, eyed the cornices, openly assessed the lace curtains. “I don’t even know if I like you, James Strauss.”

     “Ah… no,” Jimmy said. “That’s true.”

     “Do you know we’ve never even spent any time alone together?” Natalie continued, and then she said, “Alone together. Now, that is what they call an oxymoron.”

     “Oxymoron.”

     “A long word for things that don’t fit together. I’m at Wallingon right now.”

     “Do you like it?’

     “I like it a lot,” Natalie said. “I’m going to be an English teacher.”

     “You could always get your degree and then get married,” Katherine said.

     “I could,” Natalie admitted, sipping her tea, “and depend on a man for the rest of my life.”

     “All women depend on men,” Friederich almost snapped.

     “Do they?” Natalie said, unimpressed.. “I don’t think Miss Strauss does,” she nodded to me. “And I don’t think I will either.”

     Friederich frowned over this, and I imagine he was reassessing the value of his son marrying Natalie Keller when, suddenly, she said to Jimmy, “Can you drive?’

     “A little.”

     “I drove here.”

Ah, Grandma! And she’s just like Grandma. And I can hardly stay awake. My eyes are like rocks. God, they itch. Grandma! The one bright thing about all this shit.

     “I DROVE HERE.”

     “You drove?” Friederich said.

     “Yes,” Natalie said. “It can be done. My car, well, it’s my father’s car, is on the corner. What if we were to go driving? Would you like that?”

     “Can I drive?” Jimmy asked, eagerly.

     “Not if you’re no good,” Natalie told him. “My father would kill me if you ruined his Roadmaster. I’m not afraid of any man in this world, but I do fear Peter Keller.”

     She took him out, certainly not the other way around, and they were gone for several hours, and when Jimmy returned he was flushed with excitement. How Natalie felt, who could say?

That night when I went to Jimmy, he held me down fiercely, and as he fucked me with more earnestness than I’d ever felt, he kept growling, “Natalie! Natalie! Natalie!” Until her name melted into a growl and an exclamation, and he flooded me as he collapsed and passed out.

The courtship of Natalie Keller had begun that day, but my affair with Jimmy did not end. Natalie had very definite ideas about life, and she was going to finish college before she married. Not only that, but she insisted Jimmy go as well. Jimmy was lacking in ambition, and he did not travel very far. He and Steiger both went to Ancilla, the little Catholic College started by the Jesuits that was just on the far north of town, near the suburbs. Natalie finished up her four year degree and wanted to go onto graduate school, but was willing to wait until after her marriage. Jimmy did his two years, though Steiger stayed on. The day came when Jimmy went down on one knee and Natalie accepted his proposal. She seemed happy, but not surprised and not grateful, the way my sisters had been. This was the wedding the Strausses and Kellers had been waiting twenty years for, Some might even say the wedding I had been waiting for since we’d first come to America thirty years ago. Natalie’s train went down the entire aisle, and was born by Keller and Dashbach and Steiglitz cousins. Steiger was best man in his black tuxedo. The maid of honor was Caroline Dashbach, Katherine’s younger cousin, but also the girl I had found for Steiger, and if his eyes were not exactly on her, then hers were on him. She had her own money, and we would make sure Steiger had his. The marriage of James Strauss and Natalie Keller was a success, and soon after, in 1950, though it was a smaller affair, so was that of Steiger and Caroline Dashbach.

More or less in the present, now, in regards to the history of his family Pamela was composing, reading about people he had known, or at least people he almost knew, Jim was too red eyed to read on, and every time things began to be somewhat normal, Pamela entered in all of her madness and her incest, and so, eyes red and aching, James B. Strauss stretched, closed the book and, flicking out the light, moved for bed, and the comfort of Seth Moore.