POV

Inspirational song: Changes (David Bowie)

Rotary was inspiring today. It was the day that they award the Slick Haley scholarships to students who have turned their lives around, or overcome significant obstacles, to become good students and good citizens. Some of these kids were the first in their family to graduate high school, and most have the potential to be the first to graduate from college in their lines. All were nominated by their teachers, counselors, and/or principals, based on their achievements. They had key figures in their lives introduce them, to explain why they were nominated and why they won. And then each young person gave a short acceptance speech. It was a wonderful ceremony to witness.

This evening's writers group was sparsely attended. I was disappointed, because I was very proud of the piece I wrote, and I wanted to share it with a larger audience. We were given a prompt, suggested by one of the young men there last week (a no-show for tonight), to write a scene, and then rewrite it in three different ways. We could change genres, settings, time periods, points of view, or anything we wanted. I waited until the night before to think about it. And then, late last night, as we had our bedtime soak in the hot tub, I remembered that it was almost Tuesday. I need to think of something to write, I said. Help me come up with something, I asked. So the man started pulling random things out of the air. The Ultravox song Vienna. A film noir setting. Footwear. Random song lyrics. He kept brainstorming until I jumped in and played along. We came up with an outline, which I sketched out on an envelope before bed. This afternoon, starting at around 230, I finally started filling it out. And once I got going, it flowed. I did a teeny little research, and picked out the name of a real woman who once existed. It just went from there with a life of its own. I may do some rewrites on it, but I've decided to share the rough draft. This is what I put together in four hours, a story in four parts. It changes voice abruptly at the end. Be prepared. (After the photo)

Jade Slipper Suite

Movement One: Vienna

The scent of coffee, fresh bread, and cigarettes was carried through the window on the breeze off of the Danube. Reichsgraf Karl von Starhemberg stirred from his dreams of dancing through mist to find the bed next to him cold. Where was Fanny? He looked around the bed chamber of their Vienna town house, and saw her heavily beaded ball gown tossed carelessly across the Louis Quatorze chair by the open armoire. Most of her gowns were still hanging neatly in place, but her pink valise was gone. 

Strains of last night's argument began ringing in his mind. Fanny had been overwrought at how the lower classes were now addressing them directly, without any respect to their titles and the privileges that were owed to the count and countess until that horrible law was passed last year. Until now, she had considered the abolition of titles to be entirely irrelevant. She was convinced that with or without them, they would always remain the von Starhembergs.

It all changed last night, when she was truly faced with the new reality. "How can you stand it, Karl?" she shrieked when they were alone in their bed chamber. "You let that sausage-eating oaf call you 'Herr Starhemberg,' and it just rolled off of your back. Our title dates back to the Holy Roman Empire, and you can just let it go like it was nothing!"

"It is nothing now, liebchen. At least they have not confiscated our property. We are not cast out on the streets. I can learn not to sign my name without writing 'von' in the middle."

She had carried on for another half hour in that vein, until she stormed off to take a bath and he crawled into bed, thankful for the silence. 

His valet came in to prepare him for a shave and to lay out his clothes for the morning. "Heinrich," he asked, "have you seen Fanny this morning?"

"Nein, Herr Starhemberg, I have not. Und her maid said she was not summoned this morning. But Stefan has just returned in the auto, and I can ask whether he transported Frau Starhemberg anywhere today."

Karl frowned. Why would Fanny ask the driver to take her anywhere? If she was angry, she might have run off to the Schloss in Tyrol. She had done it before. It would explain why her valise was gone, but it wouldn’t account for the wardrobe full of gowns.

Karl swung his feet off of the bed, preparing to submit to his valet’s ministrations. He extended one arm into the jade silk dressing robe that Heinrich held open, and looked around the floor for the matching footwear. “Where the devil are my slippers?” he thought absently.

Movement Two: Love’s Great Adventure

Fanny tucked her small hand into the bend of Dickie’s elbow, and gave him a deeply-dimpled smile as they strutted into the smoky jazz club in Harlem. Jet beads danced above her scandalously rouged knees as she walked, and the jade green feather attached to her headband bobbed along with each step. Dickie adored her, and she allowed him to squire her around town as his favorite prize. She never expected to find love again after she fled Vienna in the night, nine years ago. She had loved Karl deeply, but she had loved being a countess more, and here in New York City, the social climbing industrialists loved nothing more than to worship European aristocrats as if their nobility would rub off onto their clothes by association.

Dickie was a cousin by marriage to the Vanderbilts, and he knew that Fanny was his best ticket into all the parties that his relatives threw. But better than that, he really did love her. He always called her countess, and although he sometimes asked her to divorce the count she had left behind in Austria to marry him, he knew never to press the issue. Fanny loved to dance to wild jazz music, drink bootleg whiskey, and make love until dawn. She was so beautiful, even now in her early thirties, her bobbed golden hair worn in a Marcel wave, her figure still slim and boyish in the fashionable straight-cut dresses. She always wore a tiny piece of light green hidden somewhere in her outfits, from the feather over her temple tonight, to the jade lavaliere she wore frequently, to those silly green slippers she wore in her bedroom sometimes. They were ridiculously big for her, like they had once belonged to a man, but she never answered him when he questioned their provenance.

Tonight was an echo of so many other nights with Fanny von Starhemberg. She drank too much, she laughed too loudly, and she let him know as soon as she was ready to go back to his suite of rooms at the Waldorf-Astoria. Dickie had to move out of those rooms by the end of the week, as the hotel was moving over to Park Avenue, and the original structure was being torn down. But he was hanging on to his bachelor quarters as long as he could, partly because he was comfortable there, partly because it was so private when Fanny was in the mood for love, and he didn’t want to do anything to change her mind. She was passionate about everything, including her surroundings. She liked these rooms, and he would do anything to keep her happy. Hell, he would do anything to keep her at all. She had been restless lately, and Dickie didn’t want to do anything to rock the boat.

As they lay entwined on his bed, their skin still damp from another wild night of love, Dickie ran one finger down the side of Fanny’s face, tracing her delicate hairline from temple to ear. He looked at her Cupid’s bow mouth as he asked softly, “Wake me up before you go.”

“Go?” Fanny asked with a slightly guilty tinge to her voice. “Why do you assume I’m going to leave?”

“It’s what you do, isn’t it? You love a man until his life is upended, and then you disappear.” Dickie didn’t know where the bitterness came from, but it spilled out suddenly.

“Life is an adventure, dear Dickie,” Fanny admitted without artifice. “And so is love. When it is time to go I will. But that time is not now. Don’t worry. You still have me for tonight. Who needs tomorrow? Let’s make this last as long as it will, and then set it free when it is over.”

It wasn’t the declaration of love Dickie wanted, but he knew it was all he was going to get for now. He closed his eyes and gathered Fanny close, thankful that his time with her was not over yet.

Movement Three: Dancing With Tears in My Eyes

On a cool morning in early March, the frost had not yet melted off of the grass on the meticulously clipped lawn at the Schloss in the north of Tyrol. Tension gripped everyone in the manor house, from the cooks and maids to the gray-haired count who stood on the terrace overlooking his Alpine gardens. The Austrian government had not voluntarily ceded control to the Nazi party, but after the resignation of the Chancellor, there was no way to prevent the coming Anschluss. Life as they had known it was irrevocably changed.

Karl Starhemberg stared sightlessly over sculpted hedges and classical statuary. “It has come to this,” echoed over and over in his mind. What he wouldn’t give for one last dance with Fanny. She had been his whole world when they were so young and naïve. When the only tragedy they had faced was losing the “von” from their names. And then, tempers reached a pitch, and he let her go in a blaze of vanity and self-importance. How could he have not held on to the one true love of his life?

He had heard she went to America, to let the social climbers carry her along on wings of gold. But it had been years since he had a solid report of her whereabouts. Not since the little man styled himself as Fuhrer of Deutschland had he been able to keep in touch with his industrialist friends from across the world. So many of them had abandoned him and abandoned Austria as war loomed and they forgot their promises made in Versailles and St Germain. And now it was too late. Fanny had disappeared, and the Austria that he loved was about to vanish along with her.

Karl wanted to believe that she was well. He wanted to believe that she was living somewhere with a man who treated her as well as she deserved, who could hold her in ways that Karl had failed to do. Sometimes, when life was at its most bleak, he pulled out the jade robe he wore the day she left. He kept it hidden from his valet so that it was never thrown out. It made him feel closer to her, knowing that she had stolen his slippers when she left like a thief in the night, with only a small valise. He often wondered whether she had taken anything else of value. She took his jade slippers, and she took his heart. What more did she need?

He became aware of the sound of sobbing coming from the Schloss. At first he thought it was his own, but he realized that his tears had been falling silently for several minutes now. It was the housekeeper crying into the coat of his driver Stefan, the same loyal employee who never forgave himself for driving Fanny to the train station that morning in 1920. Stefan stood stoically while Frau Muller wrinkled his wool coat in her fists. He stared off at the road leading up from the village. Karl followed his eyes and saw the flash of sunlight off of the shiny automobiles before he heard the sound of their engines. The Germans had arrived. “It’s over,” Karl lamented to the gathered staff. “It’s all over.”

Movement Four: We Came to Dance

I was tipped off by a man with a badge that I needed to be in a cheap motel on the Missouri side. A dame had been found, he said, and she had a whiff of old money about her. Someone was going to come looking for information, even though the word wasn’t going to be good. I arrived at the same time as the fellas with the cameras, light bulbs flashing in every direction as I nodded at the uniforms keeping back other customers from the motel, and I walked past their barricades.

The scene inside the room was worse than anything I’d ever seen. It looked like whoever offed this dame didn’t just do her in, he danced with her body before he dropped her on the floor. The lamp was broken on the floor, the mirror was smashed, and the covers from the bed were tangled around the woman’s body where she lay. She was still wearing a fancy dress that had seen better days, even before it sported gashes from an angry son of a bitch with a knife.

The dame was probably fifty or better, but she looked like she could have passed for forty in the dark. The badge who tipped me off was right. This woman didn’t belong in this filthy rat house. She looked like she belonged in a castle somewhere. And whoever did this to her didn’t care about robbing her. She still wore a fancy jade necklace that any thief would have lifted in a heartbeat. It didn’t seem to be about sex either. She was still fully dressed, except for her shoes. Someone was going to be looking for this dame. Someone who would pay for news, good or bad. I pulled out a pencil and pad to take notes.

There was precious little left in the room. There was a mostly empty bottle of bourbon still upright on the night stand. There was an old newspaper from V-E day spread out on the floor by the one little chair next to the window. And there was an open pink suitcase on the floor right next to the woman’s hand. The only thing inside of it was an old pair of men’s house slippers. They were light green, and way too big for a woman, but there were worn, dirty footprints in them that were tiny like her feet, like she wore them all the time. Ain’t that a puzzle? I wonder what the story is there.

I closed my notepad and nodded to the uniforms on my way back out of the scene. Someone would be calling about this one. I just knew it.