Stowe, Vermont
August 1957
Thunder crashed, and lightning cracked, and the storm outside the window of their bedroom caused a well of happy emotion to rise up in Maria. Ever since she was small, she had always loved thunderstorms. She loved them in all forms: when they came as she wandered through the wilderness, when they came as she tucked herself high into the tight nook of a tree, when they came as she skipped rocks across the surface of a brook or a lake and twirled around in circles, inviting the water to soak her skin and clothes, make her wake up the next morning with the sniffles to be scolded by her mother—she did not care. She loved all of it.
There was a crackle in the air every time, and she could taste the heavy dampness. She could sense a storm coming on, could see it rolling in, and know that all would be well after the rain, no matter what transpired during.
But for her husband, it was an altogether different story.
If someone asked her to describe his feelings about a thunderstorm, she would simply say that she liked them, and he did not. Closer to the truth, however, was that he often outright hated them. The crashing, rolling, cracking sounds, sharp like a whip, made him nervous and irritable and jittery, and woe betide anyone who crossed his path as a storm picked up.
That is, when it was bad.
When it was good, he could relegate his feelings to dislike, and distract himself with a book or his work. Maria would notice, usually, and do her best to help distract him. When the children were small, she would gather them all together in the living room and hand him the guitar. They would sing and listen to songs until the thunder and lightning passed, or the children fell asleep in the heap that was their pile of little limbs and happy, cherub faces. As they became older, Maria would pull novels of the sea off the library shelves and hand them to her children, urging them to ask their father to read them aloud.
He read to them in English, he read to them in German, he read to them in Portuguese, and he read to them in Italian. Whichever of the older in the brood was also there would join, and whisper occasional translations to their littlest siblings, and as such things went, the youngest of the brood grew up well-read, well-spoken, and were assured a bright future equal to their well-educated older siblings who ran the gamut from medicine to professional dancing.
Brigitta and Friedrich shared an interest in medicine; he became a doctor, specializing in the study and treatment of pediatric cancers, while his sister was more taken with the human mind. Louisa was similarly disposed, having decided to study veterinary medicine. Marta was a singer, and also taught piano, while Gretl was dancing in a small ballet company in New York City and had fallen in love with her dancing partner, whom she planned to marry the following year. Kurt, always so fascinated by work he could do with his hands, was a builder and lived nearest to his parents, living with his wife in Montpelier. She had studied business, and so together they ran his construction company, and he was well-sought after. Liesl had been a dancer for a decade herself, but retired from the touring circuits when she met her now-husband and they decided started their family. She now worked part-time as a secretary for a law firm, and her husband was a dentist.
Leaning against the doorway of the drawing room with her arms crossed over her chest, Maria would watch these little congregations of her husband with his children, not unlike when she had watched him play the guitar for his motherless brood for the first time in years long ago, and reflect on how incredibly blessed she felt, and how blessed he was by these children of theirs. When they had married, she had wondered if he would want to have any more children, and had told him that she could accept either answer, and he had said, "Let's try until we agree we're done."
So they had. The first few years yielded nothing, but just when Maria thought it wouldn't happen and that things would remain as they were, it did and she was carrying Rosemary. And then, in quick succession, her other three children arrived, and it was when Matthias was born that they agreed: he was the last, and this would be the end of the baby years for their family.
Maria had certainly heard of women who fell pregnant unexpectedly in their mid- or late-forties, and had encountered a few when she studied nursing after school, but somehow she had gotten it into her head that she couldn't possibly be one of them, especially since by the time she miscarried, it had been so long since she'd had a baby—forgetting that this was not the true way of things.
It was strange, how truth could be so easily manipulated. How the human mind's capacity for reason and belief could be hijacked and replaced with what fear insisted was right. And, Maria reflected, even when the edicts of that fear were rejected, the outcomes were still often prone to error and misjudgment, and… well, that is was precisely how the unintended fifth child came to be.
She was watching him now, watching her husband as he poured over a map with Matthias, the two of them murmuring together over some small detail that their son had noticed and asked his father about. Maria had been in her garden when she realized a storm was on the horizon, and when finished had gone to see where her husband was, only to find that her son had beat her to it.
The storm thundered and crashed overhead. Eleanore and Johannes came home from their summer jobs drenched, having walked together up the long drive, and were both showering now. Eleanore had asked to use her parents' bathroom, and Johannes had the upstairs one. Maria glanced briefly at her watch to check the time, knowing she needed to set the table for dinner, but she could not seem to pull herself away from the scene in front of her.
Georg had one arm around his son and held his reading glasses in that hand, dangling loosely. With the other, he held the map out over his crossed lap, and Matty was tracing something, asking questions and looking eagerly up at his father. He grinned at her broadly when he caught sight of his mother standing there in the doorway watching them, and continued with what he was saying. His voice, while now much deeper than it had been even just the previous year, still cracked sometimes when he was excited, as he was now, and it made Maria smile.
Time moves so fast.
Dinner was filled with the chatter and prattle of their adolescents, to which Maria and Georg both simply listened and responded, cutting food and placing it into their mouths, nodding and agreeing and offering a comment now and then. When Rosemary trudged in halfway through and flopped down in her seat, sighing dramatically, Maria and Georg shared a knowing, amused smile across the table and Maria asked her daughter what it was that had her in such a state.
Rosemary piled food onto her waiting plate and launched into her story, with her brothers and sister asking questions and carrying the burden of conversation through the rest of the evening.
As Maria readied herself for bed, she sat down on the edge of her side of the bed to towel her hair dry, deep in thought. Her children keeping up with their own happenings and excitements largely left her to her own mind, that night, and of late, her mind had been full of rather a lot. Absently, she pressed a hand to her flanks, feeling for tightness or heat, and found nothing. The incision from her surgery was now sufficiently healed, and she'd been permitted to bathe again for a week now. She'd been walking outdoors every day, and she and Georg had come to an agreement that if she used a saddle and rode a smaller horse than their draft, that she could ride again.
"I feel so weak, and not just because of the surgery," Maria had said. "I need to be able to be active, Georg."
Georg considered Maria's plea, thinking. He was so worried about what would happen if she fell or was thrown, and what the impact could do to her kidneys. The ground of their paddock behind the barn was hard and rocky, and therefore not ideal for much other than the horses grazing.
Running a hand through his hair, Georg sighed, and said slowly, "If I plowed half of the paddock for you, and had the children help remove all the rocks, that might keep you safe."
"You'll have to plow it often," Maria said, trying to keep the excitement out of her voice at this proposition.
Georg shook his head. "It isn't any matter to me. If it means you can do something that you've felt was taken from you, and it keeps you safe, I'll plow the paddock twice a day."
These words rendered her speechless, and Maria nodded, tears streaming from her eyes.
They had spent a lot of time talking in the past two weeks. They had talked of everything and nothing, but most of all they talked of how things had changed since Maria became ill, and why they had changed. This thing particularly, Maria brought up because it had been on her mind the day that she and Georg drove out to Lake Elmore, and it was by talking about it with him that she finally understood that why it mattered was because not riding a horse robbed her of strength and physicality that she otherwise had no reason to engage in. When she was stronger, the pain was less, and it was easier to do even simple things.
"I want to hike again, too," she said. "Not too far, and not too long, at first. We can stay close to home. But I need to feel my lungs expand fully again, and not because I'm sobbing from pain."
These things, all these unsaid things, left Georg speechless. He wanted to ask why she never said these things, wanted to wonder aloud, but he did not have to wonder. Not really. He knew the answer. He knew that she did not say these things because she had been scared, and she had been angry, and she had wanted to protect those she loved from the depth and breadth of her pain. He knew because he knew this, too. It was terrifying, all-consuming, and ever so wrathful. The greatest thing one was aware of while under this weight was that if you let it slip loose even just a little, the full impact of its power would unleash itself against people who did not deserve it and harm them, too.
It was this pain that kept him away from his children in the years before Maria came, and the captors that bound him were shame and guilt, whispering cruelly that he did not deserve to have them, that his wife deserved a man who was able to do the hard, right thing instead of the thing that brought happiness, for if he had managed that, she might still be alive. It was these lessons that had motivated his harshness against Maria, the stubborn morality of keeping her alive for the sake of them all harder and more resilient than her own stubborn defiance, and so in time, they had fallen into that routine where he cared for her, and she vacillated from sort-of-well to sick again and again, hiding from him the true extent of her illness unless it was too much to bear alone, because of the pain.
In different ways, from different places, they had bought the lie that pain sold them.
Maria lay nestled in his arms one night, tracing a finger back and forth along his arm, following its path as she told him how she had bought the lie. How she had learned from terrible circumstances in her youth that when she had dire needs was when other people were most likely to be inconvenienced or hurt by it. That simply bringing her suffering near caused others to feel it, too, and so she had learned that it was best to keep it to herself, take herself away, and work it through herself.
Except, she had found, she nearly never had the right tools to work it through herself.
"People tried," Maria said quietly. "Teachers, instructors, my parents, my grandparents. But if it hurt too much, I turned away, closed them out. The only one who was ever able to sit with me in my pain and push me and challenge me when I wanted most to draw away was the Reverend Mother."
Georg thought about how he had had similar thoughts regarding Maria, and her ability in her fury and passion to draw him out of himself, see the world around him for what it truly was, and to see himself for who he really was. She had shown him a version of himself that he hated, but she had also shown him deep compassion and understanding. She had shown him the truth. She had shown him that it was possible to be broken, to be hurt, and yet to live one's life.
He remembered how, so long ago on that terrace, he had thought to himself that there was no way her fury was just about the children. There had been fire in her eyes, disgust on her face, contempt in the way she held her body. Her heart was with his children, but the way she hurled the truth at him had felt in so many ways to him like it was something she had needed to do. Not for them, but for herself.
She hadn't hurled words at him like that since, not until… well, not until she'd left to go to Boston. The memory of the conversation showed how her hands shook, how tense her body was, just how angry and hurt she was by everything that had brought her to that suffocating, smoldering place of blame. And though the blame was misplaced, and she had admitted this and apologized, Georg was able to recognize that once again, it had been something Maria needed to do.
Tick. Tick. Tick, tick-tick. Tick.
Maria blinked, looking over at her bedside clock. The thing had always lagged behind at certain intervals, only to jump ahead to the appropriate place at the last possible moment. Perhaps it was gravity, or perhaps it was a mechanical failing. Perhaps something was bent, or the hands which built it had missed something.
But ever still, it kept time.
These thoughts kept her steady as she listened to the creak and click of their bedroom door closing for the night. Georg had just come from the study, and was pulling his glasses from his face as he yawned.
Maria turned her head to look at her husband, studying him. Studying the way he still stood ramrod straight, studying how his hair had taken on thick, deep streaks of silver, which she found so incredibly attractive, how his face showed the life he'd weathered, but his form exuded strength.
Ravenous.
"Georg?" Maria said, steadily gazing at him.
He hadn't noticed her attention, and looked at her, perplexed. Perhaps worried. "Yes, Maria?"
She swallowed. Let herself be aware of the pull in her gut, the memory of the day at Lake Elmore, how hungry she had felt, how hungry she was still. Just how satisfying touch had been, how healing it was, how much it grounded them both. She had spoken briefly with Brigitta today of this hunger, searching. Her daughter had squealed. Actually squealed. She had been encouraging, though she also spoke with caution, as though she did not want to scare her mother. Scare her not by the virtue of what they discussed, but rather the magnitude of its significance.
"Mother?" Brigitta had said, just before she hung up.
"Yes, love?"
"Do it. And use the bathroom after!"
"I…" Maria had trailed, wordless as the phone clicked and the dead line buzzed in her ear.
But it was just as well, because since the miscarriage, Maria had begun steadily to feel better and better, and she wouldn't put it past herself to have forgotten that small detail, afterward, and her condition was delicate enough that the significance of the entire undertaking could be ruined by that small oversight in a matter of days and she'd be right back where she started.
Raising her chin, Maria dropped the towel for her wet hair onto the floor beneath her and said, "Lock the door."
He stood completely still in that moment. His brow furrowed, and his eyes went wide.
"And breathe, please!" Maria reminded, her voice urgent.
"You are sure?" he murmured at last.
"As sure as I have ever been," Maria replied.
"That is quite a lot," he observed.
"Yes," she agreed.
He swallowed, looked at her strangely, and then just as she asked, locked the door.
"What is it?" she asked.
He walked to her. Sat down. Tried to speak and then failed. Tried again when she placed a hand to his face and looked at him with such compassion that he thought he felt his heart wrench in his chest.
"I… I don't know if I remember."
"The only thing that is important," she whispered, "is that you haven't forgotten."
She leaned in to kiss him, then, long and deep and purposeful, and as her hand wrapped around the back of his head, Georg found himself paralyzed and electrified all at once. Would this be what she wanted? Could he be what she needed? He didn't know.
"Think of this" she whispered in his ear, her breath warm and soft as he kneaded her breasts, "as starting again."
She let him remove her dressing gown, with which he discovered her nakedness, her body freshly washed from her shower earlier. Her fingers were gentle against him as she pulled his shirt from his pants and unbuttoned it, pushing it from his shoulders. Her hands worked deftly to undo his belt, unzip his pants, and pull them away as he stood for her.
She surveyed the evidence of his arousal beneath his underthings with a smirk that he had not seen in so long—that smirk that smarted of pride and pleasure and delight, and of pure knowing that he was nothing against her—and then removed those too. She sighed, tracing gently the skin of his groin, and then nodded, looking at him with a smile that invited trouble.
Her touch was fire, and he didn't know how he could bear it.
Groaning, he watched as she pushed herself back onto the bed, laid down, and splayed her legs. One crook of her finger was all it took. He climbed into the bed and did the thing that made her scream, because it always made her scream: he put is mouth to her sex and with his tongue against her hot, wet flesh, he played a love song. Her favourites were Liszt. His were Tchaikovsky. Sometimes, he wrote his own.
Burying her fingers into her husband's thick, dark hair as his tongue stroked her sex, moans began to escape her throat, and Maria thought she might lose her mind already. At every crescendo, she arched her back as her body seized and she came, and he did this thing of his again and again until she could not speak a coherent thought out loud and did not know anymore where she began and he ended.
"Hold me," she whispered, when at last she regained the power of speech, and he rose up over her and laid down beside her, and held her just as she asked.
After a while that might have been forever, Maria asked quietly, "Is it very ugly to you? The scar?"
Georg knew not to do her the disservice of refusing to look. He had seen it so many times before, this scar, helping her dress or to fasten her bindings, but this was the first time he saw it not as a thing to be tended, but as a part of her. He slid a hand down the length of her torso and let it rest over the angry, red thing and he shook his head.
"It means you stay with me," he told her.
She looked at him for a long while, before she finally acquiesced with a nod. "That is what I had hoped," she whispered. "When I made the decision."
"I am sorry I did not speak much, that week I stayed with you. I realize now that it was an opportunity to have this conversation then, and in my own hurt I thought I was doing you a favor."
"Well," Maria breathed, "we're having it now, aren't we?"
He stroked her face, counted her freckles, and supposed she was right. She was displaying incredible grace, but she was right.
"I thanked you once," Maria said, "for your patience with me. When I was new. And now I thank you again for your patience with me in my brokenness. I never wanted it to be this way. It wasn't the plan, it wasn't what was right."
Georg reflected on what she was referring to, remembering back across the years, all the way to Paris, in a time and place that seems like another life. To a time almost before she came.
Teaching Maria the art of lovemaking had been one of the best parts of their honeymoon, for it unlocked this sprite of a woman that lurked beneath the fire. Virgin though she was, she burned with curiosity and had been the one throughout their engagement that was less restrained.
She had been shy, at first, to kiss him without invitation, but became bolder quickly, and there had indeed been moments where Georg had needed to exercise his self-control to his utmost best in order to not take her away to bed before due time. She hadn't made the challenge any easier—innocent at first, but more vixen-like as she realized what it was like to know love and its desires, even if only through heated kisses and stolen moments.
Max would never let Georg hear the end of it about one evening in particular, where he and Maria had retired to the library with a bottle of wine to relax and talk after the children had gone to bed, and, admittedly the alcohol had loosened them both a bit more than was usual in their solitary evenings. Max had entered the library looking for Georg's copy of Le Figaro. What he had walked in on was his friends necking on the loveseat, to which he chuckled, saying cheekily, "Must be the wine."
Georg and Maria had leapt apart as though electrified, both looking somewhat disheveled. It had been the first time Georg had allowed himself to let Maria feel the evidence of his desire for her, and she hadn't shied from it at all, only sighing against his mouth and pressing herself harder against him, as she was apt to do even now, so baldly sizing him up and throwing impish grins his way.
In any case, Maria had blushed scarlet, attempting to straighten her hair and brush out her skirt, while Georg could only manage to catch his breath and reply sarcastically, "Oh, undoubtedly the wine," heedless of his rolled-up sleeves, unbuttoned collar, and loosened tie. "Good night, Max."
Max only looked to the ground, seeming pleased with himself, chuckled again, and grabbed the paper he was after, flicking it in indication before turning to go to his rooms.
As embarrassed as she appeared, Maria hadn't backed down like he had expected her to. At the time, he wondered if it was simply the wine, but their wedding night revealed to him that she had remembered every moment and had acted quite deliberately, imploring of him, "Show me what a man and woman who love each other do… the way we always do."
"You make love the way you fight," he'd told her afterward, dazed and spent, trying to grasp what had just occurred between them. "With total conviction that is the thing to do, and you do not back down. It is a marvel to behold."
Utterly obsessed with this startling, stunning revelation, curiosity burned in Georg, and so he had taken particular pleasure in conducting a highly rigged experiment, dragging a full-length mirror to their bed one morning. First, he gave her a full tour of his own body, unabashedly naming every part of his own sex for her, taking her hands to demonstrate how she could touch him, and how he liked to be touched.
This had been the foundation for his next motive: positioning the mirror just so in order to make best use of the early morning sunlight that flooded into their bedroom through the open French windows, a balcony beyond, he placed her in front of the mirror and settled himself behind her on the bed, stripping off her dressing gown that clung to her damp skin, fresh from her shower. Lovingly, he placed a hand over the thatch of dark hair at her crux and asked her to pull her knees up, threading his fingers through her damp curls before withdrawing his hand.
Gently he instructed her to touch her sex, revealing it carefully to her from the outside in, encouraging her to massage the sensitive, damp skin as she twisted around to kiss him; just as her breathing became hitched and his erection began to build, pressing into her back, he stopped the kiss, instructing her to pull the folds of her skin back just so, revealing her engorged clitoris.
"Touch it," he whispered in her ear, nuzzling it and placing a kiss to the tender skin behind. "See what it feels like to touch it."
By now completely taken with this exercise, she had followed the directive brazenly, and was moaning with desire under her own touch before long. Taking her available hand in his, he unclenched it finger by finger, and then slowly kissed each knuckle. He had then taken over for her, taking her into his arms, pleasuring her and bedding her as properly and lovingly as she so well deserved.
Later, reading by the fire, she had looked up when he entered the parlor, her gaze smoldering. "Thank you, Georg, for teaching me about myself these last few weeks, days, hours. For being ever so patient with me."
Sitting down beside her, Georg folded his wife into his arms and said, "Of course, my love. I have no intentions of ever being a selfish lover. I understand that you need to understand just as well what happens to your body as you need to understand mine, and us together. It is so much."
Maria presently reflected on these things, remembering, and feeling the heat of it begin anew as she was reminded what it was to lose herself, to lose her breath, to lay flat out on her bed completely limp and spent, able only to listen to the ragged sound of her uneven breath and that of her heartbeat, wondering how this could be real.
Stroking his wife's face, Georg studied the worn lines he found there and said, "I'm still afraid, Maria, of hurting you."
Biting her lip, she said, "We won't know until we try, but at least this time it will only be temporary… I hope."
So, she was nervous. He supposed that made two of them.
"Do you promise you'll stop me, Maria, if at any point there is something that is too much?"
He knew her, and he knew her propensity for pushing through pain if it meant the good of another. He wouldn't have it, and he wanted to be clear.
She hesitated, but nodded.
"And you'll let me do it all, tonight, yes? You are not yet strong enough for your usual antics, I think."
"I wouldn't have the energy if I tried," she admitted plainly, perhaps for the first time ever. "I am yours. I trust you, and I love you, and I want you. Please have your way with me."
"You're sure?" he asked once more.
"I am," she replied. "And even if I wasn't, Brigitta is rooting for us. If she thinks it's a good thing, then it's a good thing. The rest, as they say, is detail."
"I feel like I should be more alarmed and less comforted than I am," Georg sighed, "but that girl of mine is never wrong."
"No," Maria agreed, and then wrapped her arms around her husband and kissed him, groaning happily to find his erection still very much present, and finding herself feeling very much awake under his weight.
She hadn't known what to expect, other than that it would be different, now. What she got, however, was beyond her wildest imaginings. Her husband caressed her and kissed her and stroked her and whispered to her, moving lightly over her and along her and around her. He brought her to the height of ecstasy several times more before his body finally joined with hers, and when it did, he moved with care and supported her with ease, but now it was not in a way that he was disconnected from what they did. He was in control, but he was present.
It was the way she remembered, the way he always had such measured control, but still became a wild thing and yet had such consideration for her. It was the way she remembered it to be, being new. Only this time, she was no virgin, and she knew what was possible, and she could expect the unexpected, and delight in it so utterly not because it made her lose her mind, but rather because it helped her find it. It was a gift to be so close again, to feel warm and cherished, loved and so highly valued.
If anything hurt her, she couldn't remember it, so numbed from pleasure her body was. When they were finished, she lie beside him and watched him fall asleep before reluctantly climbing out of bed to visit the bathroom, just as she promised she would, finding herself grateful for the tea she'd had before retiring to bed, for it made this task more routine than obligation.
In the morning, she noticed an ache in her inner thighs that hadn't been there before, and she found red marks on her skin, and what had been spilled inside her was left on their sheets, and she looked over at her husband who slept still and felt her heart overwhelm with such love for this man that she might burst.
When at last he opened his eyes, her face split into a radiant, wicked grin and she whispered mischievously, "Let's do it again."