Julie Orringer - The InvisibleBridge

“If that were the case, he might have consulted his parents before he started filling her head with ideas about marriage and America! He still hasn’t told them he’s engaged. Apparently they’ve got a girl in mind for him already, some beer heiress from Wisconsin. He’s got no attachment to her, he says, but I’m not certain his parents will see it that way. At the very least, he might have thought to ask my permission before he gave Elisabet that ring.”

Andras smiled. “Is that how it’s done? Do young men still ask permission?”

She surrendered a smile in return. “Good young men,” she said.

And then he drew closer and bent to her ear. “I’d like to ask someone’s permission, Klara,” he said. “I’d like to write a letter to your mother.”

“And what if she says no?” she whispered back.

“Then we’d have to elope.”

“But to where, darling?”

“I don’t care,” he said, looking deep into the gray landscape of her eyes. “I want to be with you. That’s all. I know it’s impractical.”

“It’s entirely impractical,” she said. But she put her arms around his neck and raised her face to him, and he kissed her closed eyes, tasting a trace of salt. At that moment they heard Elisabet’s step in the hallway; she appeared in the doorway of the sitting room in her green wool hat and coat. Andras and Klara drew away from each other and got to their feet.

“Pardon me, disgusting adults,” Elisabet said. “I’m going to the movies.”

“Listen, Elisabet,” Andras said. “What if I were to marry your mother?”

“Please,” Klara said, raising a hand in caution. “This isn’t the way we should talk about it.”

Elisabet tilted her head at Andras. “What did you say?”

“Marry her,” Andras said. “Make her my wife.”

“Do you mean that?” Elisabet said. “You want to marry her?”

“I do.”

“And she’ll have you?”

A long moment passed during which Andras experienced terrible suspense. But then Klara took his hand in her own and pressed it, almost as though she were in pain. “He knows what I want,” she said. “We want the same thing.”

Andras let out a breath. A flash flood of relief washed over Elisabet’s features; her perpetually knotted forehead went smooth. She crossed the room and put her arms around Andras, then kissed her mother. “It’s splendid,” she said, with plain sincerity. Without another word she flung her purse over her shoulder and clattered down the stairs.

“Splendid?” Klara said, in the reverberating silence that always followed Elisabet’s departures. “I’m not certain what I was expecting, but that wasn’t it.”

“She thinks it’ll make things easier for her and Paul.”

Klara sighed. “I know. If I marry you, she won’t have to feel guilty about leaving me.”

“We’ll wait, then, if you think it’ll make a difference. We’ll wait until she’s finished with school.”

“That’s another seven months.”

“Seven months,” he said. “But then we’ll have the rest of our lives.”

She nodded and took his hand. “Seven months.”

“Klara,” he said. “Klara Morgenstern. Have you just agreed to marry me?”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes. When Elisabet’s done with school. But that doesn’t mean I’m letting her run off to America with that smooth-talking young man.”

“Seven months,” he said.

“And perhaps by then we’ll solve our geographic problem.”

He held her by the shoulders and kissed her mouth, her cheekbones, her eyelids. “Let’s not worry about that now,” he said. “Promise me you won’t think about it.”

“I can’t promise that, Andras. We’ll have to think about it if we’re to solve it.”

“We’ll think about it later. Now I want to kiss you. May I?”

In answer she put her arms around him, and he kissed her, wishing he had nothing else to do all day, all year, all his life. Then he pulled away and said, “I’m unprepared for this. I don’t have anything for you. I don’t have a ring.”

“A ring!” she said. “I don’t want a ring.”

“You’ll have one, though. I’ll see to it. And I wasn’t speaking lightly when I said I wanted to write to your mother.”

“That’s a tricky business, as you know.”

“I wish we could speak to József,” Andras said. “He could write to her, or enclose a letter from me inside one of his own.”

Klara pulled her lips together. “From what you’ve told me about his life, it hasn’t come to seem any wiser to involve him in our situation.”

“If we’re to be married, he’ll have to know sometime. The Latin Quarter is a small place.”

She sighed. “I know. It’s rather complicated.” She went back to the sofa and opened the folded newspaper. “At least we’ve got some time to think about it. Seven months,” she said. “Who knows what will happen by then? Shouldn’t we all just get married at once? Shouldn’t I be glad that my child might go across the ocean to America? If there’s a war, she’ll be safer there.”

That elusive ghost, safety. It had fled Hungary, had fled the halls of the École Spéciale, had fled Germany long before November 9. But as he sat down beside her and looked at the newspaper on her lap, he tasted the shock of it all over again. He followed the line of her hand to the front-page photograph: a man and woman in their nightclothes, standing in the street; a little boy between them, clutching what looked to be a Punch doll with a cone-shaped hat; and before them, shedding its violent light on them, a house on fire from its doorstep to its rafters. In the places where the fire had burned away carpets and flooring, wallpaper and plaster, he could see the structure of the house illuminated like the stripped bones of an animal. And he saw what an architect might see, what the man and woman and boy could not have seen as they stood in the street at that moment: that the main supports had already burned through, and in another moment the structure would fall in upon itself like a poorly built model, its beams crumbling to ash.

IN EARLY DECEMBER, Madame Gérard threw a party for her own birthday. Klara received an invitation on a heavy ivory-colored card printed with gold ink; Andras was invited as her guest. The night of the party he put on an immaculate white shirt and a black silk tie, sprinkled and brushed his best dinner jacket, and polished the shoes Tibor had brought him the year before from Budapest. He told himself that there was nothing extraordinary about the fact that Marcelle had invited him; in fact, though, this was to be the first time he had seen her since her departure from the Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt, and the first time he would appear in public as Klara’s future husband, among people who might consider him her inferior. What he feared was not just what her friends might think of him but what she might think, seeing him for the first time among the members of her circle. Those choreographers, those dancers, those composers who sometimes made her gifts of their music: How could he appear in comparison to them except as a novice, an aspirant, a perhaps-someday-but-not-yet? He wondered if that was the effect Marcelle had intended. But Klara herself distracted him from his concerns; when he arrived at the rue de Sévigné that night her manner was light and intimate. They walked the chilly boulevards toward Marcelle’s new apartment in the Eleventh, through streets that smelled of woodsmoke and approaching cold. It was difficult to believe it was nearly December, a year since they’d first met. Soon the skating ponds in the Bois de Vincennes and the Bois de Boulogne would be frozen solid once again.