The Empire of Night

38

Jeremy and I went our ways, and I had dinner alone in the Adlon Pariser Platz, the red walnut — walled à la carte restaurant off the lobby, and then I retired to my room to give Albert a head start on his drinking.

At nine I entered Stockman’s favorite watering hole. I strode automatically toward the far corner and in a few steps I could see past the end of the zinc bar to his table of choice. Three strangers in evening suits were confabbing there, two with Willie mustaches and one with a fez.

I stopped, roughing myself up in my head for not trying to formalize a drink with Albert for tonight.

But then a familiar voice said my name. “Mr. Hunter. Join us.”

Even Mr. Hunter immediately recognized Isabel Cobb’s voice.

I looked to my left.

Along the full width of this western wall ran a Bacchanalian mural, an unbroken, dancing, leaping, swooning, embracing flow of naked flesh and diaphanous gowns and goat parts under which were three arrangements for drinkers, two chairs each, their backs to the bar, a table before them, and a two-seat settee against the wall. In the center of these settings, nuzzled up shoulder to shoulder on the settee, were my mother and Sir Albert Stockman.

He was dressed in his evening suit. She was wearing a front-buttoning shirtwaist with intricate sylvan lace inserts and an apricot silk scarf thrown round her neck. She was straight from rehearsal, I presumed.

I approached.

As I did, a man rose from one of the chairs before them.

It was Madam Isabel’s director, Victor Barnowsky.

He turned to me.

“Herr Regisseur,” I said.

“Mr. Hunter,” he said.

We exchanged another strong handshake. I was reminded of my first impression of him, how like a roughhouser he seemed.

“Won’t you stay?” my mother said.

“Alas, I must go, Madam Cobb,” Barnowsky said, sounding very formal. I figured they knew enough to hide their stage-star-and-present-director warmth in the presence of her beau. “A pleasure to meet with you, Baron.” Barnowsky bowed to Stockman, who nodded at Barnowsky but said nothing. I figured Albert wasn’t quite buying all this formality between his beloved and this theater director.

Barnowsky vanished and Albert loosened a little and motioned me into the empty chair.

I sat.

This wasn’t going to be easy.

I had a front row seat before a very small stage with two lovebirds snuggled up and a great deal at stake and some messy personal issues in the script.

One of which was: I may someday need to put a bullet between this guy’s eyes.

Another of which was: He might need to do the same to me. Indeed, the only thing that was keeping his finger from squeezing a trigger was his ignorance about me. The only inhibition for me was knowing too much about him. His restraint was more apt to change abruptly than mine. That put me at a severe disadvantage in any likely showdown.

We all looked at each other for a moment in a sort of dazed silence. I didn’t know if I could talk about the Haber meeting in my mother’s presence. Had their intimacy gone far enough for that to be okay? She didn’t know what had transpired between us two men since last night and she was smart enough to let us set the tone and pace. Stockman had his airship überagenda mixing with his jealousy over his woman.

We were relieved by the bartender, whose arrival I realized by Albert’s eyes shifting abruptly up and over my shoulder. He looked back to me. “What are you having?”

I looked down at the table.

It was Sam Thompson again, though if this was still the first bottle of the evening, the two of them were drinking their way forward quite moderately, judging by the amount of whiskey remaining. Their glasses were presently empty.

“There seems to be plenty of rye left,” I said.

“A third glass, Hans,” Stockman said to the bartender.

And we were silent for another moment.

Stockman was going to have to start this.

I took out a Fatima and gestured the pack to the snuggly couple.

Stockman waved it off with a thanks and dipped into his evening suit inner pocket and took out a silver cigarette case, going after his own brand.

My mother also declined the Fatimas, with a little shake of the head and a focusing of her eyes on mine and a surging of something in them that I read as, Well, here we are, my son, in quite a melodrama together.

Stockman lit his cigarette and offered his match across the table. I bent to it and sat back, as did Stockman, and we blew smoke together.

“I was telling Isabel about our impassioned Jew at the chemistry institute,” Stockman said.

So they’d gone that far in their intimacy.

Then he made his more important point: “She has her own Jew to deal with.”

Barnowsky was still weighing heavily on him.

I glanced at Mother. She was no doubt grinding her teeth, but she was a fine actress, after all, and, indeed, since she was already pressed shoulder to arm to hip to thigh against Stockman, she even crossed her free right arm over her body and placed her hand gently on his forearm. While wishing, instead, I would’ve bet, that she could slap him in the face.

But maybe not.

She was, indeed, quite convincing. Maybe she forgave him this attitude. She was, after all, presently in love with him.

“Herr Barnowsky is a sad, driven man,” Isabel Cobb said.

Stockman took another drag on his cigarette, turned his face sharply away from us both, and blew the smoke toward the door, apparently releasing his jealousy, for his face swung back to Isabel and he put his hand over hers. “You work very hard for your art,” he said.

“Don’t I though,” she said. She was looking into his eyes for this line, but I decided she was talking to me, telling me not to worry, she wasn’t so smitten as to lose her secret way with him.

He patted her hand again and looked at me.

“This Albert Einstein was a touchy subject for our impassioned Doctor Haber,” I said.

Stockman nodded.

I deliberately slowed down.

I took a drag on my cigarette. I blew the smoke.

My glass arrived.

“May I?” Hans the bartender said.

“Sure,” I said, and Hans poured me a couple of fingers of rye.

Only when all this was done and the bartender had disappeared did I say, “You know anything about Einstein?”

“He’s a Zionist,” Stockman said. “I believe in the sincerity of Doctor Haber’s allegiance to Germany, as far as it is possible for that to go, but this other man is a dangerous man. Made even more acutely so by his apparent genius.”

“Albert was asking Herr Barnowsky about Herr Einstein,” my mother said.

Stockman turned his face sharply to her. “Are you sure this director isn’t a Zionist?”

“Of course he’s not,” she said. “He is a citizen of Shakespeare and Ibsen and Shaw.”

“This Einstein likes his Shakespeare as well, apparently,” Stockman said. “That doesn’t prevent him from despising the land that gave him birth.”

My mother patted his hand. “Victor Barnowsky is no Zionist, my darling.”

“I say you deserve better, is all,” said darling Albert.

She patted him some more. “I’ve dealt with this all my professional life.”

Stockman’s voice mellowed a little. “How difficult for you.”

He turned to me now. He was, of course, trying to make a case for himself. As her exclusive lover. Perhaps even as her husband. I was his foil. I was the jury. I was the impartial public in obvious, silent agreement with him. He said, “This is widely overlooked by lovers of the theater, the terrible sacrifice a great actress must endure for her art. That she must inevitably surround herself with actors and directors and other men of that world, unprincipled men, emotionally tumultuous and unreliable men, morally weak men.”

I could see her jaw clench at this, great actress though she was. Her hand stopped patting, but it stayed on his forearm.

Man oh man, was he ever trying to make a case. He even started to swerve back to Einstein.

“And these revered scientists. These outsiders.”

He paused dramatically.

She must have said something admiring about scientists along the way.

He said, “This Einstein has a wife and two children. They were with him when he came to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, and he drove them away. She fled to Zurich because he began an affair with his own cousin in Berlin. This cousin was no doubt the reason he returned to his despised Germany. Not his vaunted research.”

He paused to present us a moue of pained disapproval. Even Stockman could not miss the blanching of Mother’s face. He just didn’t have a clue what was behind it.

“I’m sorry to mention these scandalous things,” he said. “But there are many men of this sort in the world who can be very attractive to women. I just believe in a different way of living.”

As different as Stockman felt himself to be from the men of the theatrical world, he was, however, their kin. By something stronger than blood. By an instinct for self-performance. Little did he know. And little did he know that it was perhaps the deepest hook he had in my mother.

I could sense her gathering her actor’s strength now. She said, “This is why I’ve come so quickly and strongly to rely on you, my darling.”

He put his hand on hers. “I know,” he said.

She grew urgent. “Must you leave me next week?”

“We’ve spoken of this,” he said, lowering his voice a little. This was something he didn’t want to discuss in front of me.

Mother was playing her own, woman’s version of Albert’s earlier strategy. A man used the public setting to display his plumaged worthiness. The woman reopened a private argument with her man. I was foil. I was jury.

Of course, Mother was also doing her job. She was giving me information.

He’d told her he was going away.

This was, I assumed, the Mit der Hand trip.

“I know we’ve spoken,” she said. “But you have only reminded me now, with your characteristic eloquence — oh how I would miss that too, for even a few days, your lovely words — you have reminded me how bereft I will be.”

“You must rehearse,” he said.

“Opening night is still two weeks off. I can take a few days.”

“It’s strictly business.”

“I won’t interfere,” she said.

“I’m not sure how long I’ll be needed.”

“But at least I could come for a few days.”

“There are complications I cannot speak of.”

“I will happily stay out of your way, in any nearby hotel you wish. Just come to me at night.” She put her head on his shoulder.

He glanced my way, lifted his eyebrows to me.

I smiled a comradely smile.

He rolled his eyes.

Women.

He and I understood about that.

“I might be out until very very late,” he said.

“I will rest.”

“And your days will be empty as well.”

She lifted her head. She made a show of trying to think of a solution. She came up with one and brightened. “You have spoken so warmly of Mr. Hunter. Perhaps we can bring him. During the day he can finish our story for the American papers. And he and I might even find a chance to discuss my memoir.”

Stockman did not reply to this. His lover’s head returned to his shoulder.

He looked at me.

I leaned forward and poured two fingers of rye into his glass.

I offered it to him and he took it with his free hand, in exchange giving me a muted reprise of the comradely smile.

He drank it down, not in a quick shot but in a steady, uninterrupted draft.

I took the empty glass from him and put it on the table.

He gently extricated his right arm without letting her raise her head and he put it around her shoulders. She snuggled in. “We’ll discuss this later,” he said.

She lifted her face to him.

If I were not sitting across from them, they no doubt would have kissed at this juncture. As it was, they goo-goo-eyed each other long enough that I was forced to look away and concentrate on my Fatima for a drag and blow.

I hoped she hadn’t overplayed her hand. In spite of my encouraging Sam Thompson to help out, Albert would confront all this soberly in the morning.

They’d begun to murmur things to each other.

I thought, hopefully, about Albert Einstein’s love for Shakespeare. I figured there might be a way to approach him.

I checked out the loving couple, and Stockman was withdrawing his arm. He’d suddenly turned downright shoulder-rollingly, tie-straighteningly furtive. He seemed finally aware of the public setting. Maybe he wasn’t all that akin to theater people after all. Maybe it was just the power of my mother. The spell she put on any man.

He reached for the bottle and began to pour.

My mother sat herself up straight. She arranged the bodice of her dress. She looked at me. Calm she was, or she was simply portraying that. Confidently in Control.

Okay. She’d pressed all this forward. I’d come a long way with Albert myself. I thought I, too, could push him a little. Carefully.

“Did the rest of your meeting go well at the Institute?” I asked, while reaching for my own whiskey glass.

Maybe he’d talk a little more readily about this because it offered a clear shift away from the wheedlings of his lover.

I grasped the glass and looked at him.

He lifted two more fingers of rye. I straightened and offered my glass for toasting.

He leaned to me and we touched our Sam Thompsons. “It did,” he said.

We sat back. I sipped. He took his whiskey in one quick shot.

“I hope Doctor Haber calmed down for the colonel,” I said.

There was a brief stopping in Stockman, a flicker of something. I was afraid this was about me crossing a line. I hoped it was still about Haber. Maybe Albert had to remember how I’d learned about there being another person in their meeting. A colonel, no less. Whatever it was, it seemed to pass.

“Max wouldn’t tolerate it,” Stockman said.

Max. Nothing like a good bolt of whiskey sliding down your throat to get you to speak familiarly about your pals.

But the burn of the rye cooled and he corrected himself, made things properly proper. “Colonel Bauer,” he said.

“Is he someone I should meet?” I said.

“I can’t imagine why,” Stockman said. Quickly and firmly. I was afraid suspiciously.

I’d gotten careless.

“Sorry,” I said. “I’m just increasingly frustrated, wanting to help our cause and not knowing how.”

Stockman waved this off.

But he said nothing.

I hoped it was the apology that he’d brushed aside and not the explanation.

He was staring at the bottle.

“Can I pour for you?” my mother said.

Stockman looked at her and then at me and then at her.

“No,” he said. “Let’s retire.”

“All right,” she said.

I waited for some look, some gesture, some word from him that could reassure me he’d not become suspicious.

But he rose and she rose and she hooked her arm in his and they turned to go.

“Good night,” I said to them both.

“Good night,” my mother said.

Stockman said nothing.