Her driver took her to a hotel on the Schwarzenberg Platz. Outside the hotel waiters were setting up big red-white-and-blue Cinzano umbrellas for the cafe. It was still too brisk to sit outside for long; the sun was weak, but Edith had the feeling that she was arriving early to a party still in the preparation phase. She thanked the cabdriver, who said, 'OK, dear.'
Edith had one more thing to ask; she didn't know how to pronounce the son's first name. 'How do you say this?' she asked the driver, holding out her mother's letter. She had the name underlined: Severin Winter.
'Say-vah-rin,' the cabdriver crooned.
Edith was surprised how she liked to say that name. 'Say-vah-rin,' she sang in her hotel room as she took a bath and changed her clothes. There was still sunlight on the west faces of the buildings on the Schwarzenberg Platz. Behind the spuming fountain was the Russian War Memorial. It no longer felt like the afternoon of the same day a man had put his hand in her hair, said, 'I love you' and then burst into tears. She would send them both one of those Dresden pieces of great delicacy; she caught herself smiling at the idea that it might arrive smashed.
She put on a sleek, black, clingy blouse and a soft, gun-gray cashmere suit. She wrapped a bright-green scarf twice around one wrist and knotted it; she did things like that and got away with it. 'Say-vah-rin Vin-ter?' she said to the mirror, holding out her hand, the bright scarf like a favor.
She hated the telephone, so she would not call; she would just take a walk and drop in. She tried to picture the son of a minor artist. She had no idea whether he would buy her a drink, invite her to dinner, suggest the opera, make a phone call to have the Belvedere opened at night - or whether he would be poor and awkward and she should really offer to take him to dinner. She did not know whether to be smart and businesslike and say she had come to Vienna representing the Museum of Modern Art, who in response to Herr Winter's letter about his father's paintings ... or whether she should confess just how unofficial her visit really was.
She'd been so glad to leave Paris that she hadn't thought about what she was doing here, and now she even began to have doubts about what she was wearing. She put on knee-high, glossy-green boots and decided to leave it at that. Few enough people in Paris dressed the way Edith did, and she assumed that no one in Vienna did. Severin Winter had been in America, after all. Edith always thought of New York when she thought of America. She didn't know that Severin Winter had spent most of his time in Iowa, dividing his time between wearing headphones in a language lab and earguards on a wrestling mat (for these reasons and reasons in his genes, his ears lay flat against his head).
'Say-vah-rin,' she said again, as if she were tasting soup. She pictured a thin, bearded man who looked more in his thirties than twenty-seven. She had not looked twice at a single graduate student in America, and she could not imagine a Viennese graduate student at all. A degree in what? A doctorate in minor painting?
The sun now struck only the top row of cupids on the old buildings along the Opernring. She would need to wear a coat. She felt like buying one, but she remembered Austrian clothes as being either leather or thick, scratchy loden, so she put on her black Paris cape. It was a little dressy; when she saw herself in it, she decided she was representing the Museum of Modern Art in New York - just flown in from Paris. What was the harm?
After a short walk she was standing outside the Schwindgasse address, just around the corner from the Belvedere. Somehow, it was already dark. The street was small and cobblestoned; the apartment building was opposite the Bulgarian embassy and next-door to something called the Polish Reading Room; there was a dim coffeehouse of faded elegance a half-block down the street. She read the brass nameplates in the lobby of the Schwindgasse apartment house, then walked up a marble flight of stairs and rang a bell on the first landing. 'Say-vah-rin,' she whispered to herself. She poised her chin, expecting to look up when he opened the door; she had decided he would be thin, bearded and tall. To her surprise, she had to look down a little. The boy in the doorway was clean-shaven, and wore sneakers, jeans and a T-shirt; he looked like the rawest of American tourists in Europe. He wore a blatant college letter-jacket, black with leather sleeves and a thick, oversized gold 'I' on the breast. American Baroque, Edith thought. Obviously he was a young friend from Severin Winter's college days.
'Does Severin Winter live here?' Edith asked, not at all sure.
'I sure do,' said Severin; he bounced backward in the doorway, more like a boxer teasing an opponent to come after him than like a man inviting anyone in. But his smile caught her completely off-guard. It was boyish, but it wasn't, and she noticed the one askew tooth with the V-chip sliced deep to the gum. In the light behind him, she saw that his dark hair was thick and fluffy and clean. It's a baby bear, she thought, stepping inside.
'My name is Edith Fuller,' she said, and was surprised at how selfconscious she felt with him. 'I'm here to look at your father's paintings. You wrote a letter to the Museum of Modern Art?'
'Yes, yes.' He smiled. 'But I never thought they'd actually want one.'
'Well, I'm here to look,' she said, and embarrassed herself by sounding cool.
'At night? Don't they look at paintings in daylight in New York?' he asked. She felt flustered; then she saw he was teasing her; he was all fun, this bear, and she laughed. She stepped into a living room with so many paintings everywhere that she didn't see one of them. It was a room with at least four doorways, leading off everywhere, and it was crammed with books, photographs and objects of a most peculiar taste. She suspected that the living room was only the tip of an iceberg - one hill of a continent. There was so much stuff in the room that she didn't notice the people, and when she realized that he was introducing her, she gave a little leap. There was a woman who could have been forty-nine or sixty-two; she wore a blowzy off-the-shoulder dress which was gathered and belted and slit in a way Edith couldn't fathom - as if it had been hastily made from an Art Nouveau bedsheet. This was Frau Reiner. 'A friend of my mother's,' said Severin Winter. 'She was a model too.' Frau Reiner's deeply lined face, her huge mouth and dusky skin were all that Edith could evaluate in terms of what Frau Reiner had to model; her body was lost in the art of her dress.
Then came two almost twin men whose names were as baffling as their appearance. Their names were something on a menu you wouldn't dare to order without advice. They were in their sixties and looked like spies, or gangsters, or retired prizefighters who'd lost more than they'd won. Edith didn't know then that they were like loving uncles to Severin Winter. They were Zivan Knezevich and Vaso Trivanovich, old Chetnik freedom fighters who'd fled Tito and the Partisans at the end of the Yugoslav civil war; like a lot of others, they'd found that Vienna was close to the East. They'd had as much to do with Severin Winter's upbringing as Katrina Marek. They'd taught him how to wrestle; they'd told him to go wrestle in America and one day beat the Russians. They were former members of the Yugoslav freestyle wrestling team. Vaso Trivanovich had won a bronze medal in the Berlin Olympics in 1936; Zivan Knezevich had been almost as good.
Like two old knights out of armor, Vaso and Zivan each kissed Edith's hand. But Frau Reiner held her hand up; Edith dimly realized she was supposed to kiss it and did so. The hand was a jewel box of rings; the perfume, Edith realized with a shock, was the same as her own. One of her tastes must be suspect.
And around a heavy hardwood table with a large tile chessboard in its center, Severin Winter restlessly moved with the grace and the spring of a bizarrely muscled deer. 'Will you have some Kremser Schmitt?' he asked Edith. 'Or a beer?'
She did not like beer, and Kremser Schmitt sounded like a kind of sausage to her, but she dared it and was relieved to find out that it was a nicely chilled and decent white wine.
The old Chetniks babbled at each other in Serbo-Croatian. Even Edith could tell that their German was halting; one of them was slightly deaf and needed to be shouted to. Frau Reiner smiled hugely at Edith, as if she were an hors d'oeuvre. She felt most comfortable looking at Severin, who in relation to his friends was changing radically in her eyes. He seemed like their Darling Prince; she had never seen anyone less selfconscious. Mozart was playing on a terrible phonograph, and Severin could not sit still. He swayed in his chair; he tossed his head. Why does he wear that awful jacket, Edith thought, imagining scars on his arms.
Frau Reiner asked Severin one question after another, which he translated to Edith. 'Frau Reiner thinks you never got that cape in Vienna,' he said.
'I got it in Paris,' Edith told him, and Frau Reiner nodded.
'And your boots could only be from New York?' Right again.
None of the colleges Edith could think of began with a garish yellow 'I'.
Somehow, they all went out together. Edith thought they must look like a circus act. The two old wrestlers in their dark spy-suits and the kind of trench coats for concealing weapons; like the old locker-room boys they still were, they jostled and shoved and batted each other as they walked. Frau Reiner took Severin's arm on his right, and Edith found herself naturally holding his left. He walked them along bilingually. He would say to Edith, 'Schiele liked to eat lunch here, on occasion,' and Frau Reiner would pick up on the word 'Schiele' and hum her rich German into his ear.
'She says,' Severin told Edith, 'that she was a child model for Schiele in the last year of his life.'
'He died when he was only twenty-
eight,' Edith offered, then felt like a fool because he looked at her as if she'd just said, 'When it rains, things get wet.'
'But I don't believe it and neither should you,' Severin said.