Unknown - The Genius

Louis got married.

EARLY EVENING, APRIL 23, 1918. Louis walks the halls of the house on Fifth, a gift from his parents on the occasion of his wedding two years ago. On the day he and Bertha moved in, his mother said to him, “Fill every room,” and since then all he has heard are complaints. One would think they are on death’s door, so crazed are they for grandchildren.

Fill every room. A preposterous idea, that. He’d have to have a harem.

He’d have to be Genghis Khan. Five towering stories of wood, marble, glass, gold, and gemstones, done in the French Gothic style, groined and soaring and drafty—the house on Fifth will never be full. Every year they burn thousands of pounds of coal just trying to keep the place warm enough for human habitation.

All that stone makes the screaming echo like the very depths of hell.

Bertha despises the house. She has told Louis that she’d rather live in a mausoleum. He doubts that this is literally true, although the family resting place is in fine taste, and he assumes that fewer things break there. Homeownership holds not the slightest appeal to him, what with its tendency to disappoint: a ruptured pipe, a buckling floor. Such petty disasters would not concern the dead. Let them live on Fifth; he and Bertha will move to Salem Hills!

At least he goes to work during the day. Bertha, left alone, has had to hire staff in order to prevent herself from going mad. An average day at the Louis Muller household finds twenty-seven full-time employees, every one of them screened personally by the mistress of the house. To those unfamiliar with Louis’s proclivities, Bertha’s requirements must seem entirely backward: they must be women or men old enough to have lost their looks.

She got what she wanted. She always does.

On April 23, 1918, the day staff have all been sent home early, and those who reside permanently at the house ordered to take the evening off—leaving a silence unlike anything Louis has heard since their first, terrible night alone together, a silence that turns a ticking clock into a falling axe; magnifies, too, his anticipation, as it is only between screams that the silence prevails. A spring shower has kicked up, smudging the view from the third floor, where he stands and waits for another.

There she goes.

What sounds! Louis admires his wife’s energy. He supposes that she has proven as appropriate a companion as he could have hoped for. She does not waste time, money, or words. When she became pregnant she stopped demanding that he come to her room at night; she even threw him a bone, in the form of a new sous chef. She had achieved her goal. “One child,” she told him. “We will be happy with whatever we get.”

Already he understands that even a single child will work many changes. Every year since he was a boy Louis has gone—first with his parents, and then with his wife—to take the waters at Bad Pappelheim. When he told his mother that Bertha had canceled their upcoming summer tour, that she demanded he stay and instead accompany her and the child-to-be to the house in Bar Harbor, he expected a show of maternal support.

Instead, she defected to Bertha’s side. “Naturally she won’t be ready to sail. We’ll all stay. We’ll all go together; your father will love the idea.”

Big changes coming, seismic changes.

Again she screams, causing him to tear the delicate antimacassar he has been kneading between his fingers. He lets it flutter to the floor and paces the room, massaging his earlobes, which is what he does in moments of crisis.

He should be grateful, he knows. His shame could have been much worse. Nobody raised a finger to him, nobody shouted. They merely took him into a room and introduced him to a girl with wavy brown hair and a beauty mark underneath her left eye. Pretty, he knew, the way girls are meant to be. She had a sleepy smile, as though forever sinking into a warm bath, and appeared unaware of the proceedings. All an act, he later discovered; nobody noticed more, took more precise social notes, than Bertha.

They have that in common, the fight to maintain an outward appearance. He must look the Muller man, and she must look a normal woman— when in fact she could run the company with one arm.

The company. At least he has not let his father down in that regard. They have different styles, he and his father, but they work well together. In his middle age, Walter has become something of a fat cat, his obsession with destroying unionism bordering on the pathological. On several occasions, he and Roosevelt have exchanged words. “I have never liked the man. He reminds me of a child in need of a spanking.”

Louis, on the other hand, prefers to conciliate. You most often get your way by allowing others to believe that they are getting theirs.

The screams grow more frequent. A good sign? Or a bad one? Is she near the end? Childbirth mystifies him. Pregnancy, too. He hardly saw her the entire time; he would leave for work in the morning before she had risen, come home and find that she had already gone to bed. Each time he saw her she seemed to have doubled in size, so enormous by the end that she seemed not a person but an egg with legs.

Dear God, listen to her.

Should she sound like that? He paces. He might not love her in the way people assume, but nobody could listen to that sort of yowling without feeling a twinge of sympathy. The doctor has sequestered her on the fourth floor, along with a trio of nurses and two of her most trusted maids, two unrelated women who look identical to Louis’s eye. He never addresses them directly, because he can never remember their names, Delia and … Delilah. As if they were not difficult enough to tell apart! Too many names to keep track of, in general. Why is life so complicated? Many days he does not want to talk to anyone but simply to crawl back into bed and sleep.

The screaming goes on for another hour and then, just as Louis has begun to adjust to the noise—as he begins to wish they had kept at least the chef around, for his hunger is becoming unbearable—the house goes dead still.

His heart hiccups. A wild thought: she is dead. Bertha is dead, and he is again a bachelor. The best of times, the worst of times. He will be free, blissfully free—but only until they force him to remarry. And they will do that as quickly as possible. They will find him some pink flower, an innocent ten years younger than he, a girl who knows nothing of his history; who will perceive him as slain by grief; who will want to attend to him, soothe him; who will strive to supplant Bertha’s ghost by climbing into his bed every single night … Every single night! Oh, God!

His chest aches. He will have to produce another heir. He wishes she would scream again, just to let him know that she’s alive. Scream, for God’s sake. Scream and I’ll know you’ve gotten your child. He might not love Bertha but he could do worse. More than that—more than that: he has a sort of affection for her. If she died he would be stuck in that house, all alone, incapable of giving orders. Bertha runs the ship. Bertha knows everyone’s name and how much they are paid; it is fear of Bertha that prevents them from running off with all the valuables. He holds her in high esteem. She is the Prime Mover. He might even love her a little, as one loves a longtime friend. He does not want her to die, even as visions of liberation whirl through his mind; the stress of clashing emotions speeds up his pacing, the enormous brass coat of arms above the fireplace winking at him malignantly with each circuit. Scream, for God’s sake, scream!

Unable to stomach any more, he barges up the stairs and through the door to the designated suite. Beyond the sitting room is a bedroom they have covered in heavy sheets of rubber and canvas. He saw them setting up several weeks ago and wondered what in the world could possibly require such precautions. Did the baby explode out?