“She hates me,” Helene Bechstein said.
“Who could do that?” Hitler asked.
“Will you lie with me like we do?”
“My niece is here.”
Geli stood. “I’ll just be going downstairs. My mother’s there.”
“And so, you see?” Helene Bechstein said. She then fell back on the fainting couch and Hitler scooted forward and cuddled until his head was on the flattened pillow of her bosom. And she was gently petting his hair and humming a Brahms lullaby as Geli fled, quietly shutting the door behind her.
She hurried down to the first floor of the villa, then to the kitchen where the women were, and said, “I feel sick.”
Angela looked up and understood. “Aren’t they a pair?”
Geli shrugged in a gruesome shiver. “Mommy! Wolf!”
Ilse Meirer got up. “Shall I get you some cake?”
“I’m too busy trying not to imagine what they’re doing up there.”
“Or not doing,” Angela said.
“Yes, that’s worse, isn’t it?” Ilse asked. And the older women chuckled as Ilse got Geli some tea.
Wearing a sleeveless and belted white linen dress in the late August heat, Geli was on the northern terrace and trying to humor her uncle by finally reading Karl May’s Winnetou when she shaded her eyes from a shock of sunshine, and saw a green Daimler flow down the pebbled drive to the underground garage. Heinrich Hoffmann got out in white tennis shirt, white flannel trousers, and white shoes, and shouted up to the terrace, “We’re here!”
“Welcome!”
“Wake up your uncle!” he said, and hauled from the floor of the car a high stack of dark photographic plates, a carpenter’s hammer, and a handled leather portfolio as Henrietta got out in a pleated white tennis skirt, a frilly white blouse, and a fine white cashmere sweater tied at her neck. Hurrying up the garden path with two bottles of Kupferberg Sekt, she called, “It’s me!”
“Just as I thought!” Geli called back. She then turned and saw her uncle on the upstairs balcony in his brown woolen suit and purple tie, a foam of Chlorodont toothpaste on his mouth and a hint of blood on his toothbrush. She couldn’t tell if he’d been staring at his houseguests or at her. He ambled back inside.
Geli went through the Winter Garden and dining room and into the kitchen where Angela was helping the girl jam the champagne bottles into the icebox. Henny had styled her chestnut-brown hair in a fashionable bob just below her ears, and she was a full inch taller and far more developed since she and Geli had first met. Even Hitler noticed, for he walked in and watched Henny fitting Angela’s ham sandwiches next to a package of flank steaks and said, “Why, you’re fully grown, Fräulein Hoffmann!”
She fetchingly turned in such a way that the fabric of her blouse was strained. “You missed me, Herr Hitler?”
“
Oh, my Sunshine. Each day is night without you.”
She grinned and held out her right hand for his kiss. She childishly scolded, “You have stayed away from München too long.”
“But why not?” he asked. “Look at all I have here!”
Widening his hands to solicit praise for his property, he seemed to include his niece, and Henny’s pretty face fell into a pout. Whether from jealousy or wild speculation, Geli wasn’t sure.
Wanting some sentence to tidy up the awkwardness, Geli tried, “I have been here only two months.”
Henny flatly stated, “We met your mother up here in May.”
Angela said, “So they know absolutely everything about you.”
And then Heinrich Hoffmann sidled in with his hammer, plates, and portfolio. “Where shall we?” he asked.
“The dining room,” Hitler said. “Would you girls like to see?”
Angela brought in a tin waste can as the photographer filled the table with public relations shots of Hitler in his famous trench coat, on a field of snow, hectoring an audience; dining at the Café Heck; shaking the hands of children; striding down Thierschstrasse with Prinz; holding opera glasses as he chatted with an older woman in a fox stole; worrying over an item in the Münchener Zeitung.