“Huh-hello, Mrs. Brahe,” I stammered. “V-very glad to meet you.” I had to stop looking but I couldn’t. I knew I was making a terrible impression. But she smiled and said, “And now, dear, I’d like you to meet my husband, Willy Brahe,” in the manner of an old and tender relative introducing one to a newcomer. Somehow I freed myself and approached Mr. Brahe.
“I’m very pleased to meet you, sir,” I managed. He was a tall, distinguished looking man in a well-cut, narrow pin-stripe suit; his thin blond hair had just begun to recede at the temples and he appeared to be in his middle thirties. His eyes were blue and friendly as he slightly moved his lean body forward to take my hand, which he clasped with a firm, clean grip. I noticed that his mouth was a little thin but moist and his cheeks were lean and hard. He smiled with warmth, if also with a veiled hint of superiority.
I sat down with my thoughts in a whirl. These people seemed to me like gods, or the people you read about in old romances. Their bearing and dress were so elegant and, even in the man, beautiful, completely apart from anything in my experience. The faint suggestion of perfume emanating from Mrs. Brahe kept my senses strangely reeling.
“The Brahes, Lars, are from one of the oldest and most honored families in Sweden. You will be a very lucky boy if they decide to take you,” Mr. Anderson was saying, giving me a stern look from his small brown eyes. He was middle-aged and wore a pince-nez which always intimidated me. I stammered something and nodded. In the meantime, Mr. Brahe began to study some of the papers he had been perusing when I entered and which I saw were documents from a manila envelope marked: Lars Olsson. His wife turned her chair around to face me, seeming to envelop me with her warm gray eyes. She asked:
“Lars, Mr. Anderson has been telling us about you but I wonder if you would tell me how you like it here at the orphanage.”
Casting a side glance at Anderson, I replied that I was very well treated, but that everyone, I supposed, longed for a home of his own.
“I understand you read a great deal,” she returned.
“Yes, Ma’am, I do,” I answered, hesitating as I caught myself looking at the way her slim, well-rounded body filled the tight, close-fitting suit. Even as I did this she stretched her legs slightly and crossed them, causing her skirt to move ever so slightly above her knee. Why did it fascinate me so? Why was that little bit of leg on the inside just above her knee so important to me?
“Before you came to the orphanage you lived in town,” she was saying with a reassuring smile at my confusion. “Did you prefer that to country living like at the orphanage here?”
I didn’t know what to say to that. I blushed, then stammered:
“I’m afraid I don’t remember the city very well, Ma’am, but I’ve always been interested in it. Here in the country I’m at home and love it. I just don’t know, Ma’am.”
She had spoken in Swedish and I answered her fluently, having spoken frequently with one of the matrons, who was from Sweden.
As we talked I caught myself covertly watching how her crossed legs revealed part of her thigh, and, even as I looked her fingers, which were idly toying with her skirt, revealed a little more… and then a little more. Because of where she was sitting beside the desk, neither of the two men could see lower than her waist. Her skirt was now well above her knees. A wildness was beginning in me. I had no name for it, but there was an enormous joy and a great sense of power. I don’t know what other word to give it.
She looked at me a moment and I tore my eyes away, filled with shame and self-disgust, and then she turned to Mr. Anderson with a smile:.. “You say his mother’s name was Oxenstierna?” she asked.
“Yes,” Anderson replied. “She was the daughter of a nobleman who married a businessman and came to England to avoid her family’s censure. The father, Nils Olsson, died a few years later before the second child, a girl, was born.”
“Yes, dear,” Mr. Brahe cut in. “I’ve just been reading about it in these papers. The mother is from an excellent family. If he appeals to you, which he obviously does, it is all right with me!”
Chapter Two
It would be difficult to describe the trip from South End, England to Stockholm. There was so much that was entirely new for me. Just the sight of these people was a miracle, and here I was talking with them. Then there was the strange outside world. Also the sensation of flight, and the knowledge of imminent approach to a new country, a new family and way of life. Above everything else there was the new overpoweringly wonderful feeling already growing in me for Mother.
After we landed in Stockholm my senses were reeling so that the long drive from Bromma airport to Norrtalje was a blur in which I couldn’t separate the beauty and rapture corning from the closeness of Mother from the great loveliness of Sweden’s countryside in the spring. We arrived late in the afternoon before a large manor house where I was taken in and introduced to the rest of the household. There were two daughters, sixteen and twelve, and a pretty, red-haired maid who was just serving evening coffee.
I was so dazed by everything that I didn’t fully take it all in, but I noticed that Gunilla, the older girl, had full, laughing lips and a very large bosom. The younger, Louise, was thin and built like a boy. Both were blonde and both were pretty.
They took me into the huge living room for coffee. It was really two rooms running across one entire end of the manor divided by an arch. On one side of the arch was the music room with a magnificent Bechstein piano, while the other division was used as a living room. As we entered, Louise, or Lou as she was called in the family, since she did not drink coffee, went to the piano. In the living room Mother and Father seated themselves on one of the three large divans and leaned back to rest and listen. I sat in an armchair to one side of them.
Things began to quiet a little in me and I gradually became aware of my sisters. Gunilla, who sat on the arm of the couch beside her father, was gorgeous. Her hair was lighter than her mother’s, almost white, and it fell over her ample shoulders like rain. The eyes were blue and wide. The mouth was soft and full. Her skin, while obviously of the same fine texture as her mother’s, was richly tanned. Her body was all lushness. At the absolute peak of ripeness. Her full blooming breasts strained her white linen blouse, and when her deep contralto laugh rang out they were live things. To prevent myself from the impossible audacity of staring at these wonders I looked at the younger girl.
Louise was very sweetly attractive with the reddish blonde hair of the mother and the same gray eyes. The face was narrower, however, and had an intense expression almost always in flux as though some internal pressure struggled in her. Except for her face she suffered by comparison with her sister. Her shoulders were thin and her body gangling and straight. She wore a blue schoolgirl’s frock. Underneath it her budding breasts could be seen but they lacked the luxurious development of Gunilla. I noticed a light brush of freckles across her nose.
Abruptly I realized that I was again staring at the rich form of Gunilla. My eyes fixed themselves on the point where the tanned skin suddenly swelled as it entered the light covering. The first three buttons of the blouse were open. It seemed to me these breasts were even larger, no, twice as large as Mother’s, and to my intense excitement, followed by an even more intense embarrassment, I realized suddenly that she wore nothing underneath! I stared nearly paralyzed as my eye slowly made out the precise contour: how each breast swelled put to a large round button, and these tips began to push out in sharper relief even as I looked. A strange, fine trembling which I could not halt ran over me.
Again I felt a twinge of shame. Why was I always looking at the women so intimately?
As Louise began to play an etude, Annie, the maid, brought in a large silver tray with four demitasse cups and a pot of coffee. She placed it on the low table in front of Mother and Father. Gunilla got up and, taking the cups, passed them to each of us in turn. Then she picked up the silver pot and began to fill the cups as the maid left.