"By crushes, you mean sexual feelings."
"Crushes include sexual feelings. Innocent and naive as they may be. A lot of girls get crushes on their female teachers, especially if you're in a parochial school and are taught exclusively by women."
"Nuns."
I smile. "Yes, imagine getting a crush on a nun."
"I imagine some of those nuns got crushes on each other, too," Anna remarks.
A spreading dark cloud of uncertainty and uneasiness encroaches on me and a warning taps at the back of my awareness. I don't know why Anna is so focused on sex, particularly homosexual sex, and I entertain the possibility that she is a lesbian and this is why she never married, or maybe she is testing me to see how I might react if she finally, after all these years, tells me the truth about herself. It hurts to think she might have, out of fear, withheld such an important detail from me.
"You told me you moved to Richmond for love." It is my turn to probe. "And the person proved a waste of time. Why didn't you go back to Germany? Why did you stay in Richmond, Anna?"
"I went to medical school in Vienna and am from Austria, not Germany," she tells me. "I grew up in a Schloss, a castle, that had been in the family for hundreds of years, near Linz on the Danube River, and during the war the Nazis lived in the house with us. My mother, my father, two older sisters and my younger brother. And from the windows I could see the smoke from the crematorium some ten miles away, at Mauthausen, a very notorious concentration camp, a huge quarry where prisoners were forced to mine the granite, carrying huge blocks of it up hundreds of steps, and if they faltered, they were beaten or pushed into the abyss. Jews, Spanish Republicans, Russians, homosexuals.
"Day in and day out, dark clouds of death stained the horizon, and I would catch my father staring off and sighing when he thought no one was looking. I could feel his deep pain and shame. Because we could do nothing about what was happening, it was easy to slip into denial. Most Austrians were into denial about what was happening in our beautiful little country. This was unforgivable to me but could not be helped. My father had much wealth and influence, but to go against the Nazis was to end up in a camp or to be shot on the spot. I can still hear laughter and the clink of glasses in my house, as if those monsters were our best friends. One of them started coming into my bedroom at night. I was seventeen. This went on for two years. I never said a word because I knew my father Could do nothing, and I suspect he was aware of what was going on. Oh yes, I am sure of it. I worried the same thing was happening to my sisters, and am quite certain it was. After the war, I finished my education and met an American music stu- dent in Vienna. He was a very fine violinist, very dashing and witty, and I came back to the States with him. Mainly, because I could not live in Austria anymore. I could not live with what my family had averted its conscience from, and even now, when I see the countryside of my homeland, the image is stained with that dark, ominous smoke. I see it in my mind always. Always."
Anna's living room is chilled, and fire-scattered embers look like dozens of irregular eyes glowing in the dark. "What happened with the American musician?" I ask her.
"I suppose reality introduced itself." Her voice is touched by sadness. "It was one thing for him to fall in love with a young female Austrian psychiatrist in one of the most beautiful, romantic cities in the world. Quite another to bring her back to Virginia, to the former capital of the Confederacy where people still have Confederate flags all over the place. I began my residency at MCV, and James played with the Richmond symphony for several years. Then he moved to Washington and we parted. I am grateful we never married. At least I did not have that complication, mat or children."
"And your family?" I ask.
"My sisters are dead. I have a brother in Vienna. Like my father, he is involved in banking. We should get some sleep," Anna says.
I shiver when I first slide beneath the covers, and I draw up my legs and tuck a pillow beneath my broken arm. Talking to Anna has begun to unsettle me around the edges, like the earth about to cave in. I feel phantom pains in parts of me that are past, gone, and my spirit is heavy from the added burden of the story she has told about her own life. Of course, she would not volunteer her past to most people. A Nazi association is a terrible stigma, even now, and to consider that fact causes me to paint her demeanor and her privileged lifestyle on a very different canvas. It doesn't matter that Anna no more had a Choice about who stayed in her family home than she had a say about whom she had sex with when she was seventeen. She would not be forgiven if others knew. "My God," I mutter, staring up at the ceiling in Anna's dark guest room. "Dear God."
I get back up and make my way down the dark hallway, passing through the living room again and into the east wing of the house. The master bedroom is at the end of the hallway, and Anna's door is open, thin moonlight seeping through windows and softly outlining her shape beneath the covers. "Anna?" I speak quietly. "Are you awake?"
She stirs, then sits up. I can barely make out her face as I come closer. Her white hair is down around her shoulders. She looks a hundred years old. "Is everything all right?" she asks groggily and with a trace of alarm.
"I'm sorry," I tell her. "I can't tell you enough how sorry I am. Anna, I've been a terrible friend."
"You have been my most trusted friend." She reaches for my hand and squeezes it, and her bones feel small and fragile beneath soft, loose skin, as if she has suddenly become ancient and vulnerable, not the titan I have always envisioned. Perhaps it is because I now know her story.
"You've suffered so much, carried so much all alone," I whisper. "I'm sorry I've not been there for you. I'm just so sorry," I tell her again. I bend over and hug her awkwardly, cast and all, and kiss her cheek.
Chapter 8
EVEN DURING MY MOST BURDENED, DISTRACTED moments, I appreciate where I work. I am always aware that the medical examiner system I head is probably the finest in the country, if not the world, and that I co-direct the Virginia Institute of Forensic Science and Medicine, the first training academy of its kind. I am able to do all of this in one of the most advanced forensic facilities I have ever seen.
Our new thirty-million-dollar, one-hundred-and-thirty-thousand-square-foot building is called Biotech II and is the center of the Biotechnology Research Park, which has stunningly transformed downtown Richmond by relentlessly replacing abandoned department stores and other boarded-up shells with elegant buildings of brick masonry and glass. Biotech has reclaimed a city that continued to be bullied long after those Northern aggressors fired their last shot.
When I moved here in the late eighties, Richmond consistently topped the list of cities with the highest homicide rate per capita in the United States. Businesses fled to neighboring counties. Virtually no one went downtown after hours. That can be said no more. Remarkably, Richmond is on its way to becoming a city of science and enlightenment, and I confess I never thought it possible. I confess, I hated Richmond when I first moved here for reasons that reach far deeper than Marino's nastiness to me or what I missed about Miami.
I believe cities have personalities; they take on the energy of the people who occupy and rule them. During its worst era, Richmond was stubborn and small-minded, and bore itself with the wounded arrogance of a has-been now ordered about by the very people it once dominated, or in some instances owned. There was a maddening exclusivity that caused people like me to feel looked down on and alone. Through it all, I detected the traces of old injuries and indignities as surely as I find them on bodies. I found a spiritual sadness in the mournful haze that during summer months clings like battle smoke over swamps and endless stands of scrawny pines and drifts along the river, swathing the wounds of brick pilings and foundries and prison camps left from that awful war. I felt compassion. I did not give up on Richmond. This morning, I struggle with my growing belief that it has given up on me.