Authors: Roberta Latow
‘I knew one thing for sure – the two women were not sisters. Impossible. One had Russian blood in her, I am sure of it, and was very educated, very sensitive, delicate in her looks and ways. The other was Polish, from peasant stock. I know, our villages were not very far apart near Bialistock. At the beginning, when they had more money, it was easier for them. They would sometimes leave the Blocks for a day.
But that didn’t last long. Tatayana, the teacher, could not adjust to the life they had there. She used to say, “If the Count knew, oh, God above, if the Count knew.” And Mashinka, who turned into a worse drunkard than her brother, used sometimes to whisper to me, “My brother lied. We thought he was a rich man with a house with many rooms, educated, running a business.” I suppose that was what he wrote to the old country. Wanted to be a big-shot. Some big-shot! A drunkard, that’s all he was.’
‘The Count? Mr Pauley, what did that mean, do you think?’
‘I don’t know, ma’am, it could mean anything. I know only that as time passed they all grew more strange and reclusive, never left the house. Mashinka used to say it was because they didn’t belong there, Mimi was too good to play with the children of the Blocks. After Tatayana died, Mashinka went to pieces altogether. Only drink and keeping Mimi safe mattered to her, and that one day Mimi’s father should come and find them. Many times I asked Mimi about her father. Never would she talk about him. All she would tell me was that after the war he would come for them.’
‘Mimi will not talk to us at all about herself,’ said the Queen pensively.
‘Maybe some day. I know her for years now, and she seems a different child here. She belongs here, among people. Who knows? Maybe when she’s not so afraid and miserable. I have to go, ma’am. I’m running late.’
The Queen watched the lorry roll away, the children racing against its speed. She kept her eyes on a now healthier-looking Mimi, a more nourished child, with colour to her skin, wearing one of Juliet’s hand-me-downs. The white cotton gloves covered the chapped, not-yet-healed hands. Her heart ached, not just for Mimi but for the hundreds of thousands of displaced children Hitler and his murderous war had produced. Mimi in fact was a lucky
one: sanctuary was rare. They would be her first priority on her return to her country. To heal them, to help them find their parents, or at the very least new homes. Not often did this sovereign without a country succumb to despair, but the sight of one child saved among thousands brought hopelessness momentarily closer. The war was not going well, Hitler was devouring Europe, pulverizing England. One day she would return. But when, dear God, she thought, when? And to what? In time she pulled herself together, placed her hands for a few seconds over her face, took a deep breath and called the children to tea.
Each day of those first few months at Beechtrees, Mimi was strengthened by the changes she was experiencing. The paranoia instilled in her by Mashinka, Tatayana, and her father, to ensure her safety away from a war-torn Europe, was quickly vanishing. Almost as if it had died along with Mashinka. What was surfacing in its place was a Mimi less afraid to remember who she was, where she had come from to America and her ugly, unhappy life in the Blocks. Her uncertainty about who she was slowly dissolved along with her fear of being discovered.
The family was Roman Catholic and devout. One of the dilapidated round stone pavilions on the east lawn served as a makeshift chapel. Makeshift but ornate – it was hung in red and royal blue silk, and had several golden candelabra. On its gold embroidered altar cloth stood a jewel-encrusted cross. A stone statue of the Virgin Mary, always surrounded with fresh flowers, had been brought with them from their fallen country. It was the focus of the serenity and power that dominated God’s little acre here. It had been consecrated by a visiting cardinal who travelled for the ceremony from New York, and who returned often to comfort the exiles. Every Sunday a mass was celebrated and confessions heard, and everyone on the estate attended, no matter what their faith, to pray for peace. Every day, each member of the family made a visit to the chapel: their faith
encouraged it and adversity demanded it.
One day Mimi was taking a short cut to bring a basket of cakes from cook to Jack and Ernie when she saw the Queen emerge from the chapel. You might not have called her a beautiful woman, but something about her transcended physical beauty, something that seemed to Mimi very powerful. Her kindness? Her goodness? And there was too, for all her simplicity, an unmistakable grandeur. It wasn’t often the girl saw her alone. Today, something attracted Mimi to her. She walked through the falling leaves under the afternoon sun and watched her benefactress sit down on the top step of the pavilion-chapel as if waiting for Mimi to join her. They smiled. Mimi sat on the bottom step and looked up at her.
‘What a lovely autumn day, Mimi.’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ Mimi answered her. They remained silent for some minutes, the Queen looking out across the parkland and enjoying the sun on her face, the peace and quiet, and the presence of this charming child. Mimi did not take her eyes from the woman. The Queen realized how close they had become. She raised Mimi’s hand and removed the white cotton glove. She caressed the hand, turned it over, and taking a pair of eyeglasses from her pocket looked at it.
‘Oh, Mimi, your hand is looking so good. Soon, maybe even in a few days, you won’t have to put on the ointment or wear your white gloves. Only in the kitchen, to keep them pretty and smooth.’ She turned the small hand over in hers again and remarked, ‘Mimi, you have the hand of a lady. Somehow I don’t think it was meant to be a worker’s hand. I think you have the hands of an artist, a pianist … yes, maybe you have musical hands.’ She replaced the glove on the child’s hand.
‘I was born in Prague. And our house had a family chapel, too. Would you like to see it? If you would, I could show you my pictures.’
And that was the breakthrough they had all been waiting for. Once Mimi had spoken of the chapel in Prague, she was able to put the pieces of her life together for herself and the family. She continued on her way to deliver her basket to Jack and Ernie at the gate, once she and the Queen had decided that she should bring her pictures to tea for everyone to see.
At the gate the two men greeted her and she told them all the news of what was happening at the house. She asked, ‘Jack, you keep telling us, “The FBI always gets its man.” Is it true?’
‘That’s right, Mimi.’
‘You never miss?’
‘Never. We may not get him right away, but we never give up. We always get our man. Just like I said.’
‘Then you could find my father?’
They might not know the details, but the agents were not insensitive to what this child had been through. They had seen every day the changes in her. They sensed this was an enormous thing she had come to do, asking them to find her father. Jack and Ernie looked at each other. Then Jack, who was sitting on an old wooden chair, called her to him. Placing an arm around her, he told her. ‘Yes, but … er … you would have to give us all the information you have about him, and then time to get everything ready for our search. Can you do that?’
They saw the hesitation in her face. Then she nodded. And for the first time since they met Mimi, she smiled for them. She smiled, and they worried. They had remembered the ‘dead or alive’ part of the FBI formula. The man they eventually got was as likely to be dead as alive. It was something they had not stressed in their light-hearted boasting to the children.
He was handsome, tall and slender. His dark hair was worn maybe too long for a military man. He had enormously sexy, violet-coloured eyes, the more so for their hooded lids, shape and the ever-so-slight slant to the way they were set. Bedroom eyes that simply devoured women. Everything about his square-shaped face complemented everything else. The Roman nose, the high cheek-bones and sensuous lips, the cleft in the chin. His body spoke to women and his every action, when centred on a woman, was a promise of lust, sexual delights, a possibility of love.
He cut a dashing, romantic figure in uniform. An officer and a gentleman. Provenance: one of those occupied foreign countries Americans hardly knew existed before Hitler had their populations heil-ing him in terror, recipients of the vague charity of high-society war-relief balls in New York.
He stood with Gertrude Lawrence and a sleekly uniformed Clark Gable, the more handsome and exciting for belonging to real life, not some movie. A matinee idol stepped down from the silver screen for the duration of the war. The party – several colonels, a brigadier general, a much too pretty WAC officer, and a scattering of luscious ladies in elegant gowns or smart little black silk dresses, sporting tiny, teasing, cocktail hats with fetchingly seductive veils just covering the eyes – glittered with vivacity like spectacular jewels.
They were only one of the parties in the five-deep crush of beautiful people laughing, flirting, drinking at the bar in
the Stork Club, awaiting a table. The room rang with chatter, a humming energy, much glamour and bravado, an intense excitement befitting heroes bent on a victory over evil. St George targeted on the old Teutonic dragon. The kind of extreme passion to live, laugh and love that occurs in a capital city in war-time, free for the moment from the fray and destruction. Hardly a man in the room was out of uniform: the vibrancy of military power added a frisson of danger held in check. Mostly high-ranking officers from all the services, managing to forget war and their fragmented lives for a few hours, to make contact, find a place for themselves in a city where it was impossible to locate a hotel room, a restaurant, a lady not already taken. New Year’s Eve, New York City. The dying hours of 1943.
Barbara Dunmellyn was a tall, willowy blonde with the looks of a showgirl: wealthy, very New York Upper Fifth Avenue chic, cultivated and intelligent. Not the usual credentials for a Smith graduate with aspirations to be a great American painter. She had been standing for some time searching the sea of people for her uncle’s party before she spotted the man and labelled him a lady-killer. She could not, for all the noise and shoving of the crowd, stop staring across the room at him. He had a magnetic quality that was relentlessly drawing her to him. She must get closer, know what it would be like to feel his lips upon hers, be caressed by such a man, devoured by him.
She was not alone in her carnal lust for Count Karel Stefanik. Were not two beauties already in thrall to him? She watched him flirt, amusement in his eyes as he played with the women. She was jealous. It was mad, insane, but there it was. She wanted him, and for no other woman to have him. She tried in vain to keep herself in check.
He hadn’t as yet seen her. For him she didn’t even exist, but she was in love. She tried to rationalize such madness. Impossible. The men in her life usually fell wildly in love with
her.
She didn’t much like this reversal of roles. She was
a woman accustomed to controlling her relationships with her men, the lovers who lost themselves to her. She had a penchant for great men who somehow continued to cross her path, men of letters, passionate, sensual men. Men of genius and power, with legendary purpose in life. She was attracted to nothing less.
Barbara Dunmellyn was an enchantress who knew how to tame men like that, and, once tamed, was clever enough to keep them. Men adored her for that rare combination in women: beauty, courage, unselfconscious sexual passion, a finely developed creative soul, a fiercely intelligent mind, an ability to subordinate herself to them without losing herself. She was a woman with whom heroic men of genius fell fatally in love. Such men for her were an aphrodisiac, a necessary drug.
Once in love, she was capable of great sacrifice. The sacrifice of self. She enjoyed loving men, being part of a man’s life – especially a demanding man with greater talents than her own, someone of enormous ambition, mesmerising power, destined for monumental success. A man who might change the world, make history. She enjoyed playing second fiddle to such men and paying homage to that something special that heroes have. Her unswerving interest in her lovers and their work bound them to her. Such men are seldom immune to the flattering attention of a beautiful woman.
They were like fodder to her. Imperceptibly she devoured them. They were what nourished her own, very private, creative impulse. Her lovers reaped many rewards from loving Barbara none greater than the brief glimpses afforded of her soul. She never allowed more. She was an egocentric and yet self-sacrificing woman, who could be capricious yet fiercely devoted. Men loved her for that, and for her never being shrewd or reckless in her relationship with them. She was as ruthlessly honest in love as she was in all aspects of her life and work.
When she fell out of that state of being in love, she found herself again. A stronger self that quickly moved on. She was a heart-breaker, and she sensed, when her eyes met those of the handsome mesmeric figure across the tense hedonism of that room, that she had met her match. Maybe even her destiny.
Someone pushed against her. An accident. One she was grateful for. It broke the spell, jolted her into making a move. But she had hardly made any headway through the crush of people when Sherman Billingsly, the owner-host of the Stork Club, New York’s most famous, elitist nightclub, spotted her. Pushing his way through the revellers, he greeted her, took her by the arm, cut a path through the crowd and delivered her to her uncle, the brigadier general, now talking to the man she wanted.
He took her hand in his, lowered his head to place his lips upon it. It was more than a courtly kiss, that first grazing of his lips on her skin. She felt a shiver of pleasure. It made her smile. His eyes, by the smile they returned, showed that he understood the erotic interest he had aroused in her. Their introduction by the brigadier was brief, hardly audible against the din of laughter and chatter. She didn’t catch the man’s name before she was swept away from him and into a greeting from Clark Gable.
She accepted a glass of champagne, let herself be dazzled by his open, sexy smile, the Gable dimples – and not for the first time. Gable and her uncle were long-time hunting buddies. Now they were sharing a war. Clark and Barbara had met on several occasions. Theirs was always a ten-minute flirtation, nothing more. Tonight, in the crush of revellers eagerly bent on seeing out the old year, her flirtation with cinema’s current male icon appeared to be just what was needed to buoy her up. It was she, Barbara Dunmellyn, who made the first move on Count Karel Stefanik.
At just the right moment she turned from Gable to
Gertrude Lawrence, the brigadier’s close friend, the charming and glamorous singing star of London’s West End and New York’s Broadway, who had the Count captivated by her seductive charisma. She intruded upon them by planting a kiss on Miss Lawrence’s cheek.
‘Happy New Year, Gertie.’
‘Barbara!’ The star, delighted to see her, returned the kiss.
‘You can’t have him, Gertie, he’s mine,’ Barbara whispered in the lady’s ear. Then she made a gesture: a shrug of her shoulders, the raising of her hands as if to the gods. Insinuating that it was beyond her control, that fate, or some god indeed, had ordained it. She quickly slipped her arm through Karel Stefanik’s and gazed into his eyes, ensuring that her gaze transmitted the intensity of her need for him.
He removed the glass from her hand and placed it with his on the bar. Then, never taking his eyes from hers, he disengaged himself from her. They were apart for only a few seconds before he pulled her slowly towards him, savouring every nuance of taking control, drawing her into an embrace. She was surprised by his strength, his fingers biting into the flesh of her arms. Their bodies touched. His first words to her were, ‘This cannot be a love story. There will be only a beginning, no middle and no end. I don’t want to deceive you about that.’
It was a deep rich voice, his English perfect but graced with a foreign accent, sensual, with seductive, honeyed overtones. Not quite a French accent, nor one as soft as Portuguese: something in between, impossible to place because of an occasional guttural sound. It was the accent of a man who spoke several languages fluently. There was, too, a sexual undercurrent in every word of warning he uttered.
This was not the man she had expected to encounter when she fell in love with him across a crowded bar. Barbara Dunmellyn was not the sort of woman to steep
herself in an obsessive affair, certainly not interested in unrequited love. She had to admire his astuteness in knowing that she expected love. No, not expected, demanded love from her men. This was no mere warning that she wasn’t going to get it from him. Nor was it made as a teasing ploy in the game of seduction so congenial to certain men. This was a statement of fact. And something else. A message: I’m yours, sexually yours, for as long as it lasts. I want you in just the same way as you want me.
That was quite a message, and one rarely spelled out so directly even now, two years after Pearl Harbor. Barbara mused on the idea that this was 1943, and things were a great deal different from before the war when American sex was for the most part still dressed up as love. War-time excused promiscuity, the fulfilment of sexual needs and attractions. These days there was an immediacy that placed courtship on the back burner of life. Romance of the moment, rather than love, was the order of the night. Pent-up erotic passion expressed itself in relationships never meant to last. They had become acceptable, indispensable even, at least for the duration of the war.
‘Are you so sure about this?’ she asked him.
He touched her long, blonde hair, held some of the silky tresses in his hand and, bringing them to his lips, kissed them. ‘Quite certain.’
The intimate gesture sent a shiver of erotic delight through her. It changed him from stranger to lover. No matter his declaration that they would never be a love story. One brief moment in their life-time: she could live with that, if he could. She was mesmerized by him. It was a fight against submission to his magnetic charm. But Barbara Dunmellyn was strong, as strong a girl as he was a man. She won her brief but intense fight against his becoming an obsession. She stood up to the reality of the situation he had created. She told him, ‘I’m different from the other women you make that speech to. I’ll not succumb to you in a lie, as
I am sure most of them do when they tell you they accept you on those terms.’
They were jostled by a passing woman, a beauty. She apologized to them. Barbara caught the flirtatious look she gave Karel Stefanik. The time, the place, the night, inspired flirtations. They were running through the crowded bar like wildfire. The way he assessed the woman did not go unnoticed by Barbara. It told her something about him. He was a lover of women. He had the kind of adoration for them that the most exciting womanizers have. It was the eroticism, the physicality of women, that excited him; the way the female mind worked through the body. It was his passion for women that made him so attractive, quite apart from his sensual good looks, his very special persona. He confirmed what she was thinking when he reacted to the newcomer by pulling Barbara even closer to him. ‘You have a far more sensual beauty than she does. And you feel right in my arms,’ he whispered.
‘Let’s go somewhere where we can dance. I bet you’re a hell of a dancer,’ she suggested with a seductive smile.
‘But what about Miss Lawrence’s party? Surely we can dance there?’
‘I know a better place.’
‘We are expected.’ He grazed her cheek with the back of his hand. ‘But I don’t always do what is expected of me.’
‘I am quite certain of that,’ she assured him, and accorded him a knowing smile.
‘I’ll take care of it.’
She saw him make his way past several people to talk to Gertrude Lawrence and the brigadier, and watched him kissing Miss Lawrence’s hand. It was only a few seconds before they looked over at her. The brigadier waved, Miss Lawrence threw a kiss.
The doorman apologized for the shortage of taxis, but assured them that cabs were arriving spasmodically with new revellers. Why didn’t they wait in the bar until the
several couples before them were accommodated? ‘An hour should do it, sir,’ he told the Count. Barbara and Karel eyed each other, and there was an urgency in the look that passed between them. ‘We won’t wait,’ she told the doorman. He put on his cap and pushed the door open for them.
They stepped into the crisp cold air. Gusts of wind with the promise of snow in them swept down the street and swirled around them. They stood under the canopy for a few minutes watching couples wrapped in finery braving the elements to make their destinations before the New Year was rung in. Even in the dark street, in the cold, there was that special kind of gaiety that New York always generates over the Christmas holidays, with its passion for dressing up in silver tinsel, golden snowflakes and red ribbon, forests of pine and spruce cut into miles of Christmas boughs and trees.
‘It’s not all that far. We can walk it,’ she assured him.
They stood looking at each other for several minutes, seemingly unable to go forward into the night. That thing that can sometimes happen to two strangers who have become intimate before they have become friends. In those few minutes they were able to come to terms with that. It had not been possible in the crush of people all around them in the Stork Club.
He wore no hat; his overcoat, a military affair with wide lapels and a belt dangling through loops, was worn over his shoulders. He looked to Barbara even more charismatically attractive than when she had first seen him. Standing away from the crowd, there was about him that winning combination to be found in some men: hardness, a macho toughness, sensitivity, softness. He cut a romantic figure not only because of his sensual, mature good looks and magnetic charm, but because there was, too, an intelligent, complex personality there. It was all in the face, the way he carried himself. He was a man with a secret. A man of mystery. That was as obvious to Barbara as his good looks
and the promise of sexual bliss he insinuated. The lust in his eyes told her at least that much about him. She believed what she saw in his eyes, what he had told her. She would always believe what he said.