Authors: Roberta Latow
By three o’clock the room was nearly empty. Soon she was the last one sitting at a table. Still she hoped he would appear. At a quarter to four the mâitre d’ asked her if he could do anything for her before he left. He would leave the lights on if she wanted to remain at the table.
At four-ten Lee walked into the dining room. She was sitting rigidly at the table. He sat down opposite her.
‘Miss Barbara.’ Tears came into her eyes. ‘You will have to come with me.’
Tears moistened her cheeks. She bit her upper lip.
‘He’s calling for you.’
‘How bad is it?’
Lee could barely speak. He shook his head.
‘Where is he? What’s happened?’
‘He’s had a bad stroke. He was leaving his house. Just as he was walking down the stairs, he collapsed.’
‘Mimi?’
‘She’s with him. She’s taken it very badly. Sophia called me. She and somebody on the street helped him into the house. I got there real fast and we put him to bed. I called his doctor. He came right over. By the time I found Mimi we knew our worst fears had been realized. It was confirmed, a massive stroke.’
Barbara covered her eyes. Her hands were trembling.
‘When Mimi arrived she had already called a specialist, that man Rick, her friend the brain surgeon. He’s there now.’
‘Can he speak?’
‘It’s very difficult for him to form words, and then only in a whisper. Rick sent me here for you. The Count was able to say “Barbara”. That was all, just “Barbara”. The doctor understood and asked me where you were. I knew you were here. You must go to him.’
‘Are they taking him to hospital?’
‘The doctor says no, no use. He’s more comfortable where he is.’
‘Is there no hope?’
‘No, none. I’m so sorry, Miss Barbara.’
She swallowed hard. She took out her compact and dabbed at her eyes. Tears stained her face. ‘I don’t think I can stand upright without your help, Lee,’ she told him, a tremor in her voice.
He helped her from the chair and together, she leaning on his arm, they walked slowly from the Oak Room of the Plaza Hotel to the car awaiting them.
Sophia was the first person Barbara saw on entering the house, but she was too distraught even to acknowledge her presence. Barbara was in control of herself, but it was a tenuous control. She entered Karel’s room. Jay was there standing at the window looking down into the garden. It was a beautiful room, large, with plum-coloured walls and draperies of plum and silver-grey fabric, tied back with huge grey tassels. Sheer white curtains covering the open windows were moving in the warm breeze. On the walls were drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael and Titian in carved gilt frames. In the seventeenth-century four-poster bed of Venetian silver-gilt he lay, his head resting on ivory, linen-covered pillows edged in ecru lace, a poignantly mortal man amid the more durable finery he had amassed. Sitting next to him in a chair was Mimi, holding his hand. Rick was standing close by. It was he who saw Barbara at the door. He took her outside into the hall and closed the door quietly behind him.
‘Can you save him, Rick?’
‘No. I think you’ve come only just in time. He’s been asking for you. I’ll get Mimi out of the room.’
‘Will he know me?’
‘Yes.’
‘What about Mimi?’
‘He’s all that matters now.’
‘Yes, of course.’
Rick brought Barbara into the room. Mimi looked up.
Her tear-stained face was filled with misery.
‘He’s going to die. Oh, Barbara, he’s going to die. I can’t bear it.’
‘You have to be brave,’ said Rick. ‘Come with me, I’m going to give you a shot and let Barbara sit with him.’
‘No, I don’t want to leave him.’
‘Let Barbara sit with him.’
‘Barbara, he’s asked for you, but I don’t know if he’ll recognize you. I’m so glad you’re here.’
Barbara drew on all the strength she had in her body. She sat down in the chair and took Karel’s hand in hers. She thought for a moment her heart would break. He looked fine, exactly the same as when she had left him hours before. Only now his skin, the flesh of his hand, was cold. She couldn’t bear the coldness of his hand. She stroked it, trying to bring warmth back into it. She felt him squeeze her hand ever so slightly. Maybe there was hope. She stroked his face, his hair, she bent forward and kissed him on the lips. They were still warm. She kissed him again, grateful to feel some warmth still in his body. Jay saw her and tears filled his eyes. He tip-toed quietly out of the room, leaving them alone.
Rick returned. With a massive effort of will Karel opened his eyes and focused them on Barbara. She smiled at him as best she could and placed his hand over hers so that he could feel the ring, and then her other hand over his. She could feel a faint movement, acknowledging that he understood she was wearing it.
‘Move closer, move the chair closer, up towards him,’ suggested Rick. They moved it together. Rick carefully placed another pillow under his head and turned Karel slightly so that he had a better view of Barbara. It was a tremendous struggle and took many moments, but Karel did manage to form the words ‘love you’, in a whisper just loud enough for Rick and Barbara to hear it.
She stood up and leaned over her lover. She told him, ‘I
know. I love you too, I’ve always loved you, and I’ll never leave you.’ Tears formed at the corner of his eyes. This man, who only hours before had been an energetic, vital human being of extraordinary quality and charm, virile, her handsome lover, was dying by inches.
‘I’d better get Mimi,’ Rick told her.
Barbara wanted to slip in between the sheets and gather him in her arms, for him to die there knowing the warmth of her body for one last time, how much she loved him. But she knew that was impossible, for Mimi’s sake. Their relationship had been a secret they had both lived with for her sake at the beginning. It had continued thus for complex and emotionally volatile reasons. This seemed no time to change the pattern that had grown to be her and Karel’s life together. If he had lived, they could have faced breaking the truth to Mimi, but now? She sat down again in the chair and continued caressing his hair. She felt his body giving out, slipping away into death.
Mimi appeared in the room. Barbara began to rise from the chair, still holding Karel’s hand. Rick touched her shoulder and said, ‘No, stay there, Barbara. Mimi, why don’t you hold him, he loves you so much?’ She crawled on to the bed and Rick raised Karel enough for her to slip an arm behind him. She sat there holding him, with Barbara stroking his hand or his hair. He barely formed the words with his lips, no sound came out, but Barbara was able to read them. ‘Love you.’ Then he closed his eyes. His life had gone.
Mimi was not prepared for the death of her father. Her whole life, her entire existence, had hinged on him; he had always meant life for her. Even during those years of silence and separation, she had always known that he was alive and loved her. She couldn’t imagine a world without her father in it. He had always been her tower of strength, and now, in a matter of moments, the strength that had sustained her was gone. The loss of her father was incalculable, her life
was altered utterly. Those around her understood and gave their support. Mimi’s love for her husband and her children, her extended family, was what gave her the strength to get on with her life. Not being prepared for the death of her father was one thing, but the aftermath of his death also was something she had been totally unprepared for.
Karel left his affairs in good order with explicit instructions that his body was to be returned to his family’s country estate, a hundred miles outside Prague. There his ancestors had been interred for the last five hundred years. Mimi had been so traumatized during the last hour of her father’s life that, although she was there with him to the end, she simply had not comprehended his overwhelming love and devotion to Barbara. She did not understand the relationship between Barbara and her father, nor that his last words were for her. It was all Mimi could do to comprehend that he was dying. It had been impossible for her to understand anything else. Barbara Dunmellyn had been Mimi’s friend for most of her life. She had been slipping in and out of the Stefanik household as a friend of Mimi’s for years. The relationship between Karel and Barbara had always appeared to be one of cordiality, respect, a warm but distant kind of affection. Mimi had not considered it odd that Barbara should be present at her father’s deathbed or holding his hand. The gesture had accorded with her own distress. Barbara was her best friend, who loved her father because he was first a remarkable man and second Mimi’s father. Only the men, Rick and Jay, had understood immediately that a great secret love had existed between Karel and Barbara. Neither had discussed it with Mimi, sensing this was not the time or the place for her to assimilate a secret kept from her by two people who loved her as much as they had.
As for Barbara, she kept up a façade of controlled emotion. There was the right amount of sadness for the
death of her close friend’s father. In reality she was no less shattered by Karel’s death than Mimi. He was the great love of her life, theirs had been a great love story. She felt his loss as she had never felt the loss of any other man who loved her. When Karel had asked her to marry him and they had acknowledged to each other how powerful their feelings were, how committed they were to each other, and had been for all those years, only then had she realized that always he had been and would be the only love of her life.
Should she now emerge from the shadows of their other lives to show the world their passionate relationship? It was something she had yearned for, but had never known. When Ching Lee had appeared in the Oak Room at the Plaza with the terrible news, her happiness had been blotting out all else. So only then had she thought of Mimi and how they would have explained their relationship to her. But none of that mattered now he was gone. What they had been to each other would die their secret. With his death a part of Barbara died too. Truths such as that could not be told. It was therefore extremely difficult for her, but a necessity, to ask Mimi to allow her to accompany Karel’s body to Czechoslovakia with her. Mimi took it as a gesture of support and accepted. So the two women, with help from Barbara’s uncle, obtained through the Soviet Embassy the necessary documents to allow them, quietly and without any fanfare, to transport the body of Count Karel Stefanik back to his homeland and bury it on the family estate.
Neither woman was prepared for the aftermath of Karel’s death any more than for his sudden demise. He had long ago given up the Catholic faith. But, according to his wishes, a service was held for him in St Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue. Two bishops and a cardinal, whom he had known for years, officiated at the service. Since he had become an American citizen, Karel had dropped his title, but during that service he was remembered as Count Karel Stefanik. Both women were much moved that hundreds of
people attended the service and many more wrote letters of condolence from all around the world, people neither woman had ever heard of. He was a man who, after his courageous action for the people of his country, had kept a low profile for the rest of his life. But he had, too, lived a life of many secrets that neither woman knew anything about. Involved in it were some of the people who came to mourn him. Apart from the actual death of her father, what shattered Mimi most was that he had lived an enormously rich and varied life that she had never been a part of. She had only been a small portion of his life, whereas she had been made to feel that she was very nearly the whole of it. He had blocked her out of so much going on in his life, and she had never known it. That didn’t diminish her love for him, only made her realize she had succumbed to his charm and the love he had for her. Yet it was only a crumb of what he could have given her.
When she read the obituaries in the London
Times,
the
New York Times,
and other papers from around the world, she realized what real power he had maintained in several walks of life. That he was an existential man in every sense of the word. That he had never been tied down by anything, a free spirit who never stopped fighting for the right of every man to live that way. Every day fresh revelations as to who this man had been, what this man had done with his life, came to light. Mimi had had a giant of a father, and Barbara had had a giant of a lover. Neither of them would ever fully replace him in her heart.
Karel died on September 7th, 1987 and his body was returning to a homeland still under Soviet control after the invasion that had taken place years before. Mimi had left Czechoslovakia as a child of five and had never returned, nor had any desire to. She could barely understand why her father should request this last ritual, knowing well that the country was still under the influence of the Soviet Union.
She had long ago ceased to think about Czechoslovakia, it
had no relation to her or her life. Mimi was very American, had embraced the American way of life since she was a child. Her husband and children were American, she felt even less European than the other members of her family. She felt no connection with Czechoslovakia. So she hardly knew how to handle the local details that needed her attention if she was to bring her father home to rest. It was because of that she made contact for the first time with distant cousins to announce her imminent arrival and the purpose of her visit. ‘Keep it quiet and we’ll help’ had come the answer. And so Barbara and Mimi left with the coffin for Prague. Jay, denied permission to accompany the cortège for reasons not revealed to them, saw off the grieving women at Kennedy Airport.
Mimi was extremely nervous and could only think of getting in and out as fast as possible. From the moment the wheels touched down at the airport on the fringes of Prague, she felt disorientated. She watched her father’s casket manhandled from the plane to a waiting hearse. It was hot and extremely humid. She and Barbara were surrounded by a dozen men, officials of various departments with documents and seemingly endless stamps and seals needed to process the paperwork. Questions, escorts and demands were a nightmare for the two women. The first half hour was a muddle which Mimi could hardly cope with. The cousins, whom she had never met, were as confused and indecisive about what to do as Mimi herself. Finally it all wore her down. She lost her temper and took over with an assertiveness and efficiency that stunned the men she was dealing with. For them this was unheard-of behaviour. Fluent in Czech and Polish, and only slightly less so in Russian, she was quite capable of making herself understood. An hour and a half later they were out of customs and leaving the airport.
Some distance outside Prague, much to her surprise, having shaken off all the red tape and disposed of the
government escorts, their convoy of a hearse and two cars was stopped on the road by a policeman who signalled them to pull over to the soft shoulder behind two black Citroëns. The policeman vanished immediately, riding away from the cars on his motorcycle down a nearly deserted secondary motorway. Mimi’s heart nearly stopped. She had no idea what to expect: least of all the several men who walked from the cars to greet her. They opened the doors. She stepped out when she recognized them as some of the dissidents who had known her father, men of whom Karel had been particularly fond.
For many years they had frequented his house and dined at his table in New York.
Mimi nearly burst into tears at the sight of their sad faces, that and relief that they were friends not foes. This was so hard for her, this return that she had never expected to make. She was wearing a deep purple linen dress bordered in black along the hem and cuffs. On her head she wore a black, wide-brimmed hat that shaded her eyes; she had black gloves and a handbag. As soon as she recognized the men she removed her hat and handed it to Barbara who had followed her from the car. Her blonde hair shone in the sun. One by one the men greeted Mimi and kissed her hand. She was amazed that they should be there and insist on accompanying her to the crypt where Karel was to be interred.
Standing at the side of the road surrounded by them, Mimi felt extraordinarily strange – not ill but not at all well either. She put it down to grief. It was as if she were only half there, as if someone else was in her shoes living through this ordeal. At one point she thought she might even faint. But she rallied herself, and suddenly she was really all there and very much aware of what was going on. She turned away from the men she was talking to because she was suddenly conscious of one particular man, the only man there she didn’t know. She felt herself being drawn to
him. He had a powerfully calming and yet exciting presence. He was a handsome young man with black hair, dark sensuous eyes that sparkled with life, a quiet man with dimples when he smiled and a bushy moustache. It was madness, utterly ridiculous, but she wished that he would hold her in his arms, not to comfort her but to instil in her some of himself. His passion for life, his quiescent sensuality, those things she felt she had lost since the day Karel died.