Stolen Beauty Read online

  “I already know my letters,” I said. I swatted at a mosquito that had bitten my foot, and rubbed away a spot of blood. “I practiced outside with a stick in the dirt.”

  “Then see if you can write them.”

  Karl handed me the chalk, and I traced each letter carefully. A was for Adele. B was for Bauer. It was easier than I thought it would be.

  “See here.” Karl wrote out the letters of his name, and when the kitten mewled against my bare leg, he wrote out the word K-A-T-Z-E. Soon everything fell into place, and I was lost in the swirl of letters and symbols, the possibility of entire words and sentences already forming like a boat on a distant shore, when the others came back and Mother appeared on the porch. My sister, Thedy, stood behind her.

  “Get up at once,” Mother said. Her face was pinched, her hair still tightly wound under her riding cap. “Put on your shoes and stockings. And where is your hat?”

  Mother thought I was too young to be taught to read, but the deed was done, and within a few weeks, I was sounding out long words on my own. I didn’t like making my mother cross, but it happened so often that I’d gotten used to it. I loved the letters that jammed against one another like tsch, the soft c nestled against the tall h making a sound that could chug across the page or whisper softy enough to put a kitten to sleep.

  “You’re much too clever for a girl,” Thedy said when she found me puzzling out the words to a fairy tale at the end of August.

  Thedy was my only sister, and she was very kind. Her eyelashes curled up twice as long as anybody else’s, and when she spoke, she sounded like she was almost singing. She was three years younger than Karl and content to play the piano and dress up as Mother liked. She pleased her tutors but never asked for more books to read or spent extra time on her lessons, as Karl did.

  I wasn’t sure if Thedy meant it was good to be clever, or if it was bad. I looked to her for a clue, but her face revealed nothing.

  “Adele is the smartest girl I know,” Karl said. He was bent over his desk, tracing out small ferns and tiny edelweiss for his botany scrapbook. When he said it, I was positive that being smart was a good thing. “Maybe as clever as me.”

  “Yes,” Thedy said with a sigh. “I suppose that’s true.”

  We had no pets in the city, but kept two kittens in the country because Mother said they calmed her nerves. The cats slept on the veranda in the daytime, and under my bed at night. Thedy named the kittens after the emperor and empress: Franz was skittish and playful, not at all like the emperor with his stiff red jacket and big black bucket hat; Little Sisi had beautiful, mottled green eyes and warm brown fur.

  In the blanched heat of my seventh summer, I studied a portrait of the empress that hung in Father’s library and decided to try my own hand at art. With two sharp pencils and a single piece of watercolor paper, I sat cross-legged on the veranda and worked for hours drawing my Little Sisi with a ring of white clover looped around her ears just like the flowers the empress wound through her hair.

  When I showed the drawing to my sister, she laughed.

  “It’s darling,” Thedy said, when she saw that her merriment had made me cross. “Truly, Adele, it’s a very pretty picture.”

  When I showed the sketch to Karl, he considered it with the utmost seriousness.

  “You’ve got the proportions just right,” my brother said. His praise rang in my ears for days.

  In Vienna we lived in a white stone house directly across from the university. Because I was the youngest, I had the smallest room, but it had a bright cupola where I kept my green chaise pushed against the windows. From my bedroom, I could see the emperor’s palace and St. Stephen’s Cathedral in the Graben, and beyond it the sweep of green toward the Nineteenth District, where we summered. When I was alone, I climbed often into the windowsill and peered down to watch university students rushing to and from their classes with books tucked under their arms and neckerchiefs flying.

  Although I looked very long and hard, I never saw a single woman among the scholars. Even among the best families, few girls continued their education beyond the age of twelve. Girls who sat for the university entrance exam were gossiped about over breakfast tables and afternoon teas, and only a rare few managed the coursework. Still, I dreamt of studying philosophy, anatomy, and biology, attending lectures and talking about them around the supper table with my brothers.

  When the first gymnasium for young women opened in Vienna when I was twelve, Mother enrolled me—probably because the school was very exclusive and the talk of all of her friends.

  The first day, I was up and dressed in my blue uniform before anyone else. Nanny coiled my hair atop my head instead of wrapping it in two braids, tucked a lavender sachet into my pocket, and pinched my cheeks so they wouldn’t look pale. My stomach was nervous, and I was too excited to eat.

  “Toast, at least,” Mother insisted. Karl winked at me, and I hurried with my nanny to the school on Hegelgasse, where I entered through glossy brass doors without looking back.

  The building smelled of soap and ink, and the halls were lit with gaslights. The classrooms were set with tables instead of little desks, and I was given an assigned seat next to two girls whom I knew because our fathers were in business together. The headmistress wore a white dress with a black smock over it and took attendance from her desk. My name was first, and I called out, “Present.”

  “What are you?” the headmistress asked. She didn’t look up until I begged her pardon. Then her face turned to a prune and she said, impatiently, “Come now, Jewess or Catholic, it’s not a difficult question.”

  “Jewess,” I said, although I’d never called myself a Jewess before.

  Most of my classmates were Catholic, and straightaway at recess they asked if I’d studied Hebrew or spoke Yiddish—as if I wore a shawl over my head and smelled of cabbage and herring like the poor shtetl Jews in the Second District.

  “Papa says he hears you Jews wailing your religion songs on Fridays,” one of the girls said. She had bright yellow hair, and when she tossed her head and laughed, a whole gaggle of girls around her did the same. At that moment I resolved that I would never cackle around with a goose parade of silly girls.

  Anyway, my family wasn’t the least bit observant. Like all of our friends, my parents had declared themselves konfessionslos—without faith—because it was better for my father’s banking business, and for our standing in society. Emperor Franz Joseph had made it easy for us to leave our religion behind. At Christmastime we had a tall tree in our front parlor and exchanged gifts at the stroke of midnight on Christmas Eve. We didn’t go to church, but we didn’t go to synagogue, either. While my Catholic classmates at gymnasium attended religion class on Mondays and Thursdays the three other Jewish girls and I sat on a hard bench outside the headmistress’s office and waited in silence. I didn’t like that one bit, but there was nothing to be done about it.

  Like all of our friends in Vienna, my family had dinner together every afternoon at two o’clock. Mother sat at one end of our table and Father at the head, the maids served meat and potatoes, and my four brothers took up the center of the table with loud debate.

  “God is dead,” Karl announced one afternoon when I was still in my first year at the gymnasium.

  Nobody blinked an eye. My mother passed the potatoes, and the butler ladled gravy onto Karl’s plate.

  “Darwin certainly agrees with that,” Eugene said, waving his fork in the air. The other boys all joined in. I wanted to participate, and to know what the boys knew, but I was a girl, and no one paid any attention to me.

  Karl had begun reading for philosophy and anatomy at university that same year, and soon after he told us that God was dead, I asked if he would let me read one of his philosophy books.

  “Nietzsche is too much for a girl,” Karl said. “Even one as clever as you.”

  “Darwin, then?”

  He raised both eyebrows and shook his head.

  “Well then, anatomy.” I
popped out my lower lip in a trick that sometimes worked with him. “Teach me that. I want to know what you know, and learn what you learn.”

  “Anatomy is worse than philosophy,” Karl said. “You know a girl can’t have that kind of education.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “Because it will frighten you,” he said. “Your mind isn’t ready. It may never be ready.”

  My brother had never said such a thing to me before. I was more furious than hurt. I left his room without a word, put on my boots and coat, and asked Nanny to walk with me to the Museum of Art History on the Ringstrasse.

  “I’d be delighted, Miss Adele,” she said, and found her best hat and gloves for the occasion.

  It seemed half the city was at the museum looking up at the colorful murals or marveling at ancient artifacts collected from the tombs of dead Egyptians. I pretended to study the formal portraits that ran up the fresh red walls, while really I peered sideways at a tall oil painting of Adam and Eve standing naked and unashamed beneath an apple tree.

  What was dangerous about anatomy? I wanted to know. Why should a girl not learn about the mind and the body, or what lay beneath the skin?

  I was never permitted to visit the museum without a chaperone, but at least Mother and Nanny—or Thedy, when I could convince her to go with me—did not insist on standing beside me while I wandered through the cool galleries. Up and down the marble staircase, I searched for large, sweeping paintings of mythical events and stood in awe of pale flesh and naked buttocks. I contemplated Adam and Eve as they covered their bodies in shame, and the three phrases of man as he matured and withered away.

  Vienna was a city of music, but my interest in art was an acceptable diversion. Mother went so far as to arrange for me to have drawing lessons, which I promptly gave up when I realized I would only be drawing landscapes and flowers, and not the human body.

  Karl and I were waving good-bye to Father in the country house courtyard the following summer when his carriage pulled away with a start and my hand was caught in the wagon wheel. It happened very quickly. I saw just a small bit of what was beneath my skin—red blood, a loop of blue vein, something that looked like string—before I passed out and Karl caught me. When I woke, my hand was wrapped in a fat white bandage and I felt as if I were floating.

  “I’m sorry,” Karl said. His face was woozy, as if he were a ghost.

  “It’s not your fault,” I said before I fell back asleep.

  My hand healed, but the scar was purple and my thumb permanently twisted. Everyone said it was barely noticeable, but I felt otherwise. At school I tucked my right hand in my lap when I wasn’t writing, and raised my left hand whenever I wanted the headmistress to call on me. Karl was especially kind to me that autumn, and on a snowy evening just past the New Year of 1894 he invited me into his study and told me to close my eyes.

  I pretended to do as he asked, but kept one eyelid open just a tiny sliver.

  “No peeking,” he said.

  My brother was twenty-three. He had a thin mustache and serious brown eyes. He had begun courting a girl who was often a guest at the Wittgensteins’ music parlor, although he didn’t seem to have much enthusiasm for her. His bedroom smelled like freshly starched shirts, and the books on his desk smelled of ink and dust and the mill where the paper had been made.

  I ran my fingers blindly over the book he’d slid across his desk. I wanted to eat the words, to feel the paper turn back to pulp in my mouth, to swallow the letters and make them mine.

  “Is it anatomy?” I asked.

  “Tell me again why I should show it to you.”

  I was ashamed of the way my fingers had been twisted and scarred by the accident. That’s why I thought Karl was being kind to me. But that’s not what I said.

  “Because I’m clever, and because I want to learn what makes us human,” I said. “And because you cannot think of a good reason why I should not be allowed to study what you study.”

  “But you can’t tell Mother,” he said. “She can’t know I’ve shown you. Ever.”

  “You can trust me with your life,” I said.

  “I believe I would,” Karl said. “I believe you would be worthy of it.”

  He told me not to cry out when I opened my eyes, and so I was prepared for the worst thing I could imagine, like my hand when it had been ripped open.

  Instead I saw a man without skin, his blue and red veins beneath his skull as if his very thoughts were mapped beneath my fingertips, the whole universe of his nerves and the very breath in his lungs and the heart right at the center of his chest where I felt my own heart beating beneath my shirtwaist at that very moment. This was what I had been waiting for—a glimpse of what was invisible and yet right there below the surface of everything. In a flash, I understood there was a world of hidden knowledge in books, under clothing, and in hallowed lecture halls—entire universes that I did not even know existed, and questions I would never know to ask.

  “Look here, Adele.” Karl’s hand hovered over the red and blue lines that crisscrossed through the skull. “Here, especially, a man and a woman are the same.”

  My brother spoke to me about ligaments, sinews, tendons, veins—the long torso and the nervous system that moved through the spine, connecting everything. It was all much more splendid than I had imagined. He put his hand upon my mangled one, and traced the two bent fingers. He told me to pulse my fist, and traced a line on another page where the hand muscles and ligaments were drawn.

  “You can make your hand stronger,” Karl said. “Beneath the skin, everything is already being repaired.”

  When I next saw Adam and Eve in the museum, I knew how bones, muscle, and tendons kept the pair standing even when God banished them from the Garden of Eden. I knew their bodies completed one another’s like hand and glove, so that even after God was dead—in my naive way, I understood that somehow God had existed but was now gone—their children, and their children’s children, were able to cover themselves in clothing and to go on.

  This is not to say I understood the working of the genitalia, for clearly I did not. But I knew what made a man and a woman different, and that it was not the mind or the heart that distinguished one from the other.

  I was in my bedroom reading a Jane Austen novel one cool afternoon when the front door burst open and there was shouting on the landing and a scramble of feet up the stairs.

  “Hold his head, don’t let go of his feet, damn it!”

  I ran into the hallway and saw Karl stretched out between my brothers, his body limp and his eyes rolling up into the back of his head. I started crying no, no, but very softly, so I wouldn’t scare my brother. He had on a morning coat and striped gray pants, and one shoe had fallen off. His sock had a tiny hole in the toe. It had been a very long winter, and the house was still damp and cold.

  “Call the doctor,” Eugene shouted. “And, Adele, get back in your room.”

  Someone sent for Father, who came home and hurried directly into Karl’s room, banging the door shut behind him. I heard worried voices, and my mother telling something to the cook. Thedy came into my bedroom and sat with me. I was shaking and struggling to breathe, and my sister said I was imagining the worst.

  “He’ll be fine,” Thedy said, stroking my hair. “He has a fever, he should have stayed home instead of going to his lectures.”

  Soon the doctor swept through the kitchen and up the back staircase, carrying his black bag and the smell of medicine and sickness. Mother was sent from Karl’s room, and the whole house was quiet. The church bells rang five o’clock, and then six. I thought the silence was a good thing, and finally stopped crying and curled up into a ball under my blankets. Light drained from the day, and I could hear the university boys rushing and shouting in the streets.

  When Karl’s door opened and the doctor came out, Thedy and I jumped up to eavesdrop on the landing. We pressed against the wall and gripped one another around the waist.

  “It’s pneumonia,
” the doctor said. “I’ve given him a cold enema, and he has to stay wrapped in warm blankets.”

  Mother’s voice was high and frightened, and my father’s sounded flat as a wooden plank.

  “Will he be all right?” Father asked. “What else can we do?”

  “You can pray,” the doctor said. “If his fever doesn’t break tonight, I’m afraid we’ll lose him.”

  “Lose him?” Father asked. Mother broke into a loud sob. Thedy and I ran into the hallway and flung our arms around her. The other boys came, too, and stood in a stunned circle around us until my mother began to gasp for air.

  “Leave your mother be,” my father said. His voice was choked, his face ashen. He put an arm around Mother’s shoulder, and they went together into Karl’s bedroom.

  Father didn’t leave Karl’s side, and sometime during the night I crept in and slipped beside him. I’m sure Father saw me, but he didn’t say a word. He didn’t touch me. The room was hot and stuffy, my brother’s face was pale and blank, and every few minutes he opened his mouth and groaned. I knew Father would make me leave if I cried, and so I made myself very strong.

  I reached beneath the sheets and took Karl’s hand. It was hot to the touch.

  “You’re going to be fine,” I said. We were the same beneath the skin, but he was hot and I was cold, he was sweating and I was shivering, and he smelled of unwashed sheets.

  I closed my eyes and prayed with all my might. I’d never prayed before, but I’d heard the girls at school during their catechism and knew the words by rote: Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, I whispered. I told myself that if I believed in God, he would help.

  “Addie,” Karl whispered. I jumped. My prayers were working. “Addie, listen to me.”

  I had to put my ear right next to his lips to hear.

  “Don’t let them box you in, do you hear me? Don’t let them do that.”

  I didn’t know what he meant. I was fifteen, he was twenty-six, his hand was limp and damp in mine.