The Trouble With Eden - Lawrence Block [67]
They spent nights listening to records together. In his company she learned to love again the music she had always loved. But she would not sing it for him. Twice he asked her, and the second time she told him of her conversation with the German attaché in Paris. He listened without comment and never repeated the request.
He died in 1956. He was hospitalized for six weeks after a heart attack and was recovering slowly but surely when his kidneys failed. She had just returned home from the hospital when the phone rang. It was the doctor, the son of close friends of her husband, telling her to come back immediately. Outside his door they told her it was a matter of an hour or so. He was not in pain, he was conscious, and there was nothing to be done.
“Leave us,” she said.
She stood at his bedside and held his hand. When she was with him an hour ago his face had life and now it was a death’s head. She said, “David? I will sing for you.”
She sang Wagner. She sang in full voice while her husband’s doctor stood outside the door with folded arms, fielding one complaint after another. She sang one aria after the next, everything she could remember, and her memory that day was unimpaired. For two full hours she sang without a break, his hand in hers. Nurses moved in and out of the room and she sang uninterrupted. She was still holding his hand and singing when a hollow-eyed nurse took her arm and told her, he was gone.
She traveled. She bought presents for his grandchildren. In 1961 she bought the present Tannhauser’s from the creditors of the man who had tried to turn it into a restaurant. He had decorated it in an American Colonial motif and matched the decor with a basic American menu. She kept the decor but substituted a Viennese menu.
She supervised every detail of the operation, bought the produce, greeted guests on arrival and departure. She even did most of the baking. Her chef, with her from the beginning, was excellent, but he could not match her sachertorte, her pfannkuchen, her strudel. She had been too busy to bake for Gunther Loebner, but David Wolf had never ceased to praise her strudel.
She had opened the restaurant as so many persons opened Bucks County establishments, hoping to enjoy themselves without too great an operating loss. At the end of the first year she was astonished when her accountant reported a net loss of less than two thousand dollars. That first year was the only time Tannhauser’s was ever in the red, and each year her net profit increased.
On weekends a pianist played old standards in the cocktail lounge from ten until one. Sometimes late at night she could be talked into a song. Something of Weill’s perhaps, or an Edith Piaf song. Never anything operatic.
Many patrons, including some who came back often, called her Frau Tannhauser. She answered to that name as well as to any other.
On the first Saturday night in June, Hugh handed his car keys to the parking-lot attendant and led Linda Robshaw up flagstone steps and into Tannhauser’s. It had rained off and on through the day, but by late afternoon the skies had cleared and now the night air was cool and refreshing. Hugh himself felt cool and refreshed. His beard was properly trimmed, its few gray hairs vainly plucked out. His cheeks and neck were clean-shaven and freshly anointed with Russian Leather.
His suit was a dove gray double:knit he had bought impulsively the previous October in New York and had never worn since he tried it on. He’d been back to work when Wallaeh’s delivered it, hitting his stride in the last stretch of his first draft, and he took it from its box and hung it in his closet without noticing what it was. If they had shipped him an evening gown by mistake he would have put it on a hanger and put it away without complaint.
Tonight he came across it in the closet, tried it on, and found it flattered him. The cut was younger and more fashionable than his usual style. On his way out the door Karen made a great show of approval. “You look fantastic,” she told him. “If Linda Robshaw isn