The Muse
The needle slipped into her arm, and the vial flooded red. Gretchen watched it, this flow of unmitigated truth. Next to her, the woman in wrinkled blue scrubs smiled.
“You’re my last draw for the day, Ms. Collier,” the woman said. Her name tag read Sandee Johnson. “Then I’m off to see my grandbaby at Heckscher Playground, make the most of this beautiful weather.”
This last statement, a bit of irrelevancy disguised as small talk, was meant to distract from the blood draw, as was Sandee Johnson’s smile: twin rows of gleaming white Chiclets in a kind black face. It was a medical professional’s smile: the mouth resolutely cheerful (never mind that hypodermic needle), the eyes soft and reserved (in somber acknowledgement of whatever Sandee Johnson imagined Gretchen’s circumstances to be, not that it was any of her business). When the woman’s gentle scrutiny lingered a beat too long, Gretchen made a show of dropping her own eyes and tightening her lips into a pitiable expression before turning her face away.
Of course Sandee Johnson could not possibly suspect the real reason behind Gretchen’s blood work. But truth was not part of this game. Sandee Johnson fished for something, and so Gretchen gave something to her. She allowed herself a glance back at her phlebotomist, and was satisfied to find a ghost of pity in the woman’s furrowed brows. Her satisfaction was cut short by the realization she’d promised to stop playing such games. It was true what they said about old habits.
“That’s lovely: a visit to the park with your grandchild,” Gretchen said, engaging with Sandee Johnson as reparation. How false, how American she sounded. She gestured toward the lab’s skylight, where a rectangle of blue sky could be seen. “You’re right about it being a beautiful day.”
Sandee Johnson smiled again, genuinely this time, her eyes filled with love for a grandbaby at the playground.
“No grandchildren for you though, Ms. Collier, huh? You can’t be old enough.”
“Maybe someday.”
Did this mundane conversation set things right? Gretchen couldn’t tell. Reparation, penance, amends. It was all a new endeavor, one brought on by a voice through a metal grate. Now, her blood continued to spill into the vial, bright and full of promise. The rubber tourniquet pinched Gretchen’s bicep, and she sat immobilized on the lab’s cushioned, thick-armed, elevated throne, saying nothing further.
She’d done a different kind of tongue holding on the phone with the lawyer two weeks earlier. His accent over the line saying Brooklyn to her the way her own likely had said Somewhere-in-France to him, he’d requested she bring to his office all relevant documents. She’d said nothing at all for three full seconds before uttering a breathy, “Got it,” as if she’d been taking it all down on paper. Her silence made one implication, and her response another. Gretchen had no relevant documents. But what mattered—securing the appointment—had been achieved.
She’d walked into that lawyer’s office carrying a red leather tote large enough to contain relevant documents. She wore shoes that implied she could afford to pay for this consultation. Her hair—its scattered grays purposely untouched—she wore twisted back in a way that said she was sincere and trustworthy. She’d also painted her lips full and red in the event all else failed.
The lawyer, Jonathan Bellerman, had the graying temples of an early forty-something expecting to be taken seriously. He’d rested his elbows on his cliché of a mahogany desk and teepeed his fingertips together in a gesture of sincerity and professional interest.
“You are here, Ms. Collier,” he’d said in his stickball-on-Ditmas-Avenue accent, his pen scratching across a notepad on his desk, “because you seek to establish paternity—for your own father, is that correct?
Gretchen did not parrot “correct” back at him but only nodded, once.
“You anticipate he will deny your claim. I’m guessing there is an estate he’s interested in protecting?”
“I imagine there is. The man in question is Marty Murphy. The writer?”
The lawyer blinked, a micro-reaction. “I just read the piece on his book in The New Yorker: ‘The Muse Turns Fifty.’ The article did say he’d fallen ill.”
“He is terminally ill.”
The words were all but legible in the lawyer’s eyes: gold digger. Mr. Bellerman clicked the pen in his fingers, once, twice, three times, and then set it down on the pad.
“You should know I am not an estate lawyer, Ms. Collier, but I could refer you to one.”
“I don’t need an estate lawyer. I am not doing this to gain an inheritance, Mr. Bellerman.” Gretchen watched the man conceal a dubious expression behind a new finger teepee. This was the problem with the truth. It sounded too much like a lie.
The lawyer’s hands dropped open. “May I ask why you are doing it?”
She would not say penance. “My father is dying alone in a hospital, Mr. Bellerman. I’m his daughter, and I have no legal access to him. Not even to say goodbye.”
Mr. Bellerman’s expression wavered between doubt and sympathy before squaring again into lawyerly professionalism.
“All right,” he said. “You want to visit him. Are you aware that the federal regulations for patient visitation rights have changed? You don’t need to be blood-related to visit sick loved ones in the hospital.”
“Well, I am aware that visitation privileges must be granted by the patient—or his representative. You don’t have to have read the article in the New Yorker to know my father has been a recluse since The Muse was published. That was, what—1961? His privacy has been fiercely guarded by the same attorney for decades. My guess is any number of crazed Marty Murphy fans would like to ogle the man on his deathbed. You think his lawyer will freely grant a stranger visitation?”
The muscles worked in Mr. Bellerman’s cheeks. “Probably not.”
“If we were in any other state in this country, I could pluck a hair from my father’s hairbrush and send it off to a lab. But we are in New York State, where a paternity test can only legally be ordered by a doctor, a court, or a lawyer.”
“You sound awfully confident about the test results. Are you prepared for the media circus if you’re wrong? Or for the matter, if you’re right?”
“I’m not interested in subjecting my father to the public he detests,” Gretchen said. “If his attorney agrees to a paternity test, I will keep the test and its results private for as long as he is alive, and possibly longer. On the other hand, if my father’s attorney does not agree to the test, then, yes, I’m willing to go into the spotlight. I have nothing to lose by going to the media.”
She had everything to lose by going to the media. But Mr. Bellerman’s hungry look revealed twin facts: first, he would indeed represent her. And second, her threat of going to the media would likely be sufficient to keep her out of it. She, for whom everything hung in a delicate balance.
“Not all lies are harmful,” she’d told the priest.
“Justifying a lie does not change its nature. A lie is a lie, whether a white lie or a whopper.” Gretchen had not liked Father Silva’s use of the word “whopper.” It sounded too foreign in his Brazilian mouth. More, “whopper” implied something gratuitous, which no serious supplanting of the truth ever was. “Whopper” suggested an arbitrary act, freely chosen. It did not evoke that sense of your back against the wall.
“Surely there are degrees of lies, just as there are degrees of sins,” she’d answered back into the shadows beyond the grate. “Venial, mortal?”
“If mortal sin is the house, then venial sins are the front steps,” said Father Silva. “The same with small lies and big lies. No one just appears in a house. You must first go up the steps.”
Releasing the tourniquet, Sandee Johnson drew back her needle and attempted to divert Gretchen’s attention with a cotton ball and a bandage and a stream of chatter as she capped the vial of Gretchen’s blood. Gretchen unrolled her sleeve and imagined this vial winding up next to that of her father’s on a metal lab table, where a technician would discover the commonality in their white blood cells, how the links in their respective chains of DNA told the same exact story.
It was mere formality, this test. It was for the satisfaction of lawyers and, possibly, of courts. It was a confirmation of what Gretchen already knew. The truth about the lie they’d lived these many years.
Mr. Bellerman managed to arrange a trip for her to the hospital to witness the blood being drawn from her father. The emaciated and liver-spotted Marty Murphy lay under a hospital blanket, connected to beeping machinery and tubes of narcotics, and when the needle had gone into his arm, his eyes simply opened as if waking from a nap. These eyes, which had rested upon hers just one other time in their lives, looked at her again with the same stunned expression of recognition, and as the lawyers looked on in amazement, the writer infamous for his refusal to speak to strangers murmured to her in the faintest, hoarsest French, “You’ve come.”
The lawyers might or might not have spoken French, and they certainly could not have known the remarkable resemblance between Gretchen and her mother, but they could not have missed the import of Marty Murphy speaking in Gretchen’s native language. The lawyers shifted uncomfortably in their upholstered hospital chairs and looked over at her as she held the gaze of the man in the bed and answered,
“Oui. Je suis ici.” I am here.
FAÇADE
The Drawing
On the night that everything turns for him, a cold rain pounds the Berlin streets. It is too wet even to smoke, and so he just walks, hands in his coat pockets and the brim of his hat pulled low. Five blocks back, on a desk under an arc of lamp light, a blank white page waits.
When he cannot draw, he walks. He has become well acquainted with this neighborhood’s night streets these past five months.
The empty page on his desk tells two stories. The first is about what came before: pages and pages of failures. Designs presented in plan and interior perspective, painstakingly executed, exact, and somehow wrong.
“Something is missing.” These words, long unsaid for fear of rendering them true, he’d uttered while standing before a drawing he’d prepared for exhibition in the previous city. It was a design for a one-bedroom courtyard house: simple, rectangular, a freestanding wall subtly dividing the main living space, all enclosed by three exterior walls of brick, the fourth in glass so the garden could be seen. “It is wrong and I cannot tell how it is wrong.”
Looking with him at the drawing, his professor had puffed on his cigar and shrugged as if to say I cannot give you eyes to see it. The man exhaled a pungent green plume of smoke and gestured generally at the design as if the solution were self-evident. “It is not the external that is important, you see?” the professor explained. “Life is what matters.”
He did not see.
In that city the panel of judges, swastika pins on their lapels, judged the exhibition to be overtly socialist. Subsidy for the art school was pulled, forcing it to open privately and humbly in a bigger city occupied by bigger things, where it could attempt to work quietly, unnoticed, and undisturbed. The student brought his professor’s words with him and wrote them on the wall of his newly rented room. Not the external. Life is what matters. He needed only to live up to these words. The blank page subsequently became his Berlin companion.
The other story the empty page tells is what will come, or, rather, what certainly will never come. Time to quit, the page says to him in the morning. Your father was right, it says at night.
Walking now in the deluge, he flips up his collar and puts another city block between himself and the page. He has begun to take the rain personally. Dropping from the black night sky, it pummels his shoulders and drums against the pavement and rushes with wicked glee into the gutters.
At the street corner his eyes catch movement incongruous with the frenzied weather: a slow-moving form on the other side of the street. The gait is female. Under the shelter of an umbrella, this woman does not rush but strolls, straight-backed. He watches her glide toward the corner, where she emerges illuminated in the wide angle of streetlamp light. Surrounded by dry space, she is at once secure within, and liberated by, this most minimally-defined of rooms. The traffic light changes and the woman with the umbrella steps from the curb, with each stride carrying a space of freedom that displaces the chaos of the universe around her.
Unmoving, he watches her. It is in this moment that everything turns.
Back in his room, his coat and hat dripping from their hooks, his pencil flies across the blank page. He need not check himself; the lines are sure. In the sweep of light, something begins to emerge: a minimal exterior, a structure of steel and concrete alleviated by whole walls of glass so that it is at once a place of refuge and a point of connection to the infinite. He glances at the wall: Life is what matters.
In the weeks that follow he makes revision upon revision. His professor murmurs an unprecedented approximation of approval and marks the rough drafts, suggesting further refinements. One evening the drawing is at last complete. In the architectural studio he slips it onto the professor’s drafting table for the man to see the following day. He imagines the way the morning light from the generous industrial windows will pour over the page, illuminating its lines. He goes home with this image in his mind, not expecting that things are about to turn again.
Bauhaus
11 April 1933
Outside, the men clothed in black move swiftly. Silent but for the clopping of boot soles on the paved street, they approach the building, rifles in hand. This building, expansive and brick-faced, was until recently an abandoned telephone factory. It now bears at the front door a small, unassuming black sign with white letters reading simply, “Bauhaus.” Fanning out, the men surround the building, moving to cover the first-floor windows and guard any doors that may let out from the side or the back. They hurry, glance, and gesture. It is 8 a.m. on a Tuesday, a school day. They move to their positions in ordinary morning light.
Once in place, anticipation swells. The element of surprise, the catching in the act. The lead soldier’s pelvis shivers with keenness. He waits, hearing the chirp of a house sparrow from a nearby rooftop and the distant rumble of a truck from a neighboring street. At the signal, his shoulder meets the door.
Johannes
Inside, from the hallway, he watches her. She stands in the architectural studio at the drafting table, looking at his drawing. Backlit by an industrial window filled with morning light, she stands not more than 15 feet away from him, an apparition he dare not believe. A wave of black hair sweeps forward, hiding her profile as she bends toward the page. Johannes steps into the studio.
Still wearing her coat and hat from wherever it is she has come, Britte clutches both her gloves in the palm of one hand, the bare fingers of the other reaching toward the drawing. He watches as her fingertips graze its lines, feeling their way along the weeks of the design’s development, touching with this line a decision, and that one, a breakthrough. Her touch sweeps through the building’s open interior to the exterior walls of glass, where containment meets infinity. He wants to kiss those fingers. Then her head turns, and she, no apparition, looks back at him.
“Johannes,” she says, as if they’d spoken yesterday. She pats the drawing emphatically, and, pushing the door closed behind him, he crosses the room to stand with her.
“I’m reminded of Schiller,” she says, her eyes back on the drawing. “What you’ve done here—balancing the material and the spatial, resolving extremes—it makes me think of what Schiller said, that art should be able ‘to mediate between freedom and restraint, reason and emotion, the individual and the group.’ Look what you have done here.”
He covers her hand with his, squeezing it and the soft gloves in its grip.
“You vanish for weeks,” he says, smiling gently, “and you want to speak to me of Schiller?”
Her glance drops to their hands. He can see the memory in her face.
“It was only a dance,” he says to her. “One dance. I don’t even remember her name.”
Britte straightens and withdraws her hand, lifting her eyes back to his. “Who you choose to dance with is none of my business.”
It is then that the studio door explodes open and a man in a black uniform raises his gun.
Mies
“Stop there,” the sentry guarding the entrance says.
“This is my building,” Mies answers. “Why do you have it surrounded?”
“You are Ludwig Mies van der Rohe?”
“Yes. The director of this school and the owner of this building. I have a right to go in.”
A glitter appears in the sentry’s eyes as he steps aside.
Mies hesitates at the open door of the Bauhaus, the hallway infested now with Gestapo. The sentry raises his brows at him, and Mies clears his throat and steps across the threshold.
“This is my office,” Mies tells the officer standing behind his desk. “I demand to know what is going on here.”
The officer straightens, his face impassive. “It is the Dessau Attorney General who demands it,” he says. “The mayor of Dessau is under investigation for suspicion of Communist activity. Your school and Mayor Hesse were closely aligned before the Bauhaus relocated from Dessau, isn’t that so, Herr Professor? We have been summoned to conduct a search.”
“A search? Of an art school?”
“Not just any art school.” The officer eyes him evenly, a twitch pulling the corner of his mouth.
“There is nothing to find here.”
“Then I suppose you won’t mind us having a look.”
Mies stands motionless for a moment, holding the officer’s eyes with his own. Then he steps into the hall, turning, his arms gesturing wide.
“Open everything for inspection,” Mies calls. “Open everything.”
Britte
It is an unreal moment. His hands raised, Johannes stands between her and the gunman. A second officer enters the studio, peering first at Johannes and then at her, and Britte’s own hands lift. The man’s eyes on hers are sharp but not penetrating; his stare is meant only to intimidate. He makes his way past them to Mies’s teaching desk in the corner of the room, where the officer rifles through a stack of papers on the desktop and then yanks open drawers, pawing through their contents before slamming them closed, one after the other. As the man digs, Britte steals a glance at Johannes. He shakes his head. Just stay still.
The officer does the same with the file cabinet, digging and yanking until the last drawer is slammed and sketches and syllabi lay scattered on the floor. The man glances at the officer with the gun. A ghost of uncertainty flits between them, and the gunman’s rifle lowers a centimeter. The officer’s eyes shift back to Britte and Johannes.
“Identification!” he barks. Snapping his fingers twice and gesturing at them, he approaches, thrusting out an expectant hand. Britte dips to the purse at her feet and pulls her papers from her wallet. She stands to see Johannes slap his pockets and come up empty.
The officer plucks the papers from her hand and makes a show of looking at them and then at her face before shoving the pages back at her.
“Nothing?” he says to Johannes, and then gestures at the man at the door, who fully lowers his gun and advances, seizing Johannes’s arm with such force a gasp escapes Britte’s throat. In the blackshirt’s grip, Johannes chances a look at her: a calm face, another nearly imperceptible shake of his head. This will amount to nothing. Don’t be afraid.
All at once he is led away through the door, the back of his blond head and lean familiar frame disappearing into the hall, and she is left thinking of everything she might have said, including that the dance, the girl, mean nothing. It is true enough.
Britte darts her eyes back to the other officer, finding him looking at Johannes's drawing. As she herself had done, he touches its lines. His finger sweeps over the volumes of space and up the walls that define them, up to draw laterally along the long, flat line of the building’s roof. Here the man’s expression darkens, and Britte can see that he is captivated not by beauty and simplicity, not by ingenuity, but only by the bald display of a modern style, which to this officer’s mind is not just un-German, but Communistic. The officer snatches his finger from the page.
His hard eyes meet hers, frighteningly aloof. This is only the beginning, they say. Then the man blinks and without a word crosses the studio and disappears into the hall. His retreating footsteps echo.
With trembling fingers Britte reaches for Johannes’s drawing. Folding it, she slips the drawing into her pocketbook.