“Kaspar, is it? Delightful!” Wilhelm stammered in yankified Yiddish. He took hold of his cousin-in-law by both the elbow and the shoulder, shaking every part of him except his hand. “Professor Kaspar Toula, as I live and perspire!”
“Kaspar Tolliver,” my grandfather corrected him. “We’re Americans now. We’ve put Europe behind us.”
“You have trunks?” demanded Wilhelm. “Of course you have trunks! What we need is a porter.” He squinted up the platform, still oblivious to the presence of the twins. “Where’s that cousin of mine?”
“In the water,” said Enzian.
Wilhelm skipped lightly backward. “Whatever do you mean, dear?” When Enzian didn’t answer, he stared bug-eyed at Kaspar. “Whatever does she mean?”
“In the ocean,” Gentian murmured from the far side of the trunk. “The Atlantic. We left her down there.”
There’d been a point in Kaspar’s duration — not too far in the past — when such an exchange would have fascinated him, proof as it was of his daughters’ difference from other children; now he did no more than shrug his shoulders. “I wrote you a letter from New York,” he said, in response to Wilhelm’s flabbergasted look. “Did you read it?”
“Naturally I read it. I’m here to meet you, aren’t I?” Wilhelm hesitated. “Of course, there may have been certain points—”
“I have something to tell you,” said Kaspar. “Sit down on this trunk.”
Wilhelm’s reaction to the news of Sonja’s death was no less singular than the twins’ had been: he sat utterly still for the space of a breath, covering his mouth with two fingers, then smoothed down his pant legs and clenched his eyes shut. Gentian and Enzian studied him the way they studied everything. Kaspar sat down next to him and waited.
By the time Wilhelm’s eyes finally opened, the four of them were alone on the platform. He drew himself up, heaved a decorous sigh, and brushed a single tear from each eye corner.
“In light of what you’ve told me,” he said, “My course of action is clear. I’m prepared to formally adopt the children.”
Kaspar explained to his cousin-in-law that adoption wouldn’t be necessary, given that he himself was still alive, and Wilhelm looked appropriately relieved. In all but a strictly legal sense, however, he did come to adopt Enzian and Gentian — and even, in those precarious first months, Kaspar himself. The promised apartment was set aside in favor of Wilhelm’s comfortable sandstone manse on Voorhees Avenue, and Kaspar’s arithmetical gifts were put to immediate use. Fastidious as Buffalo Bill was in his person — his hair immaculately Brylcreemed, his twill suits never less than einwandfrei—the accounts of Empress Sisi’s Cabinet, his jewelry shop, were the bookkeeping equivalent of smoldering dung. As Providence (or fate, or random chance) would have it, Kaspar had materialized in his cousin-in-law’s life at precisely the moment at which he was most desperately required.
The challenge of transmuting chaos into order — bordering, as it did in the case of Wilhelm’s accounts, on outright alchemy — turned out to be the ideal task to arrest Kaspar’s descent into despair. The twins, for their part, got along with their uncle beautifully, in spite of the fact that he regarded them — when he noticed them at all — with the same benign befuddlement he’d first shown at the station. A Kindermädchen was procured from somewhere (a poker-faced drudge whose German was as unintelligible as her English) and Wilhelm obligingly picked up the tab. His own sainted mother had died the previous year, and he was still mourning her passionately: he never failed to kiss his fingertips and hold them up to heaven when Mutter Knarschitz was mentioned, which caused the twins to snicker with delight.
Buffalo Bill, in other words, was nothing like the character Sonja had dreamed up for him, for which my grandfather was deeply grateful. He was grateful for practically everything, in fact, over the course of that first stunned, defenseless year. In haughtier days, Mrs. Haven, he might have found much to disapprove of in the life he’d fallen into; but Kaspar was a new man now, with a social security number and a name that still rang foreign to his ears, and disapproval was an Old World luxury. A life of some sort was conceivable in this bullish border town; even — with considerably less struggle than he’d feared — a measure of contentment. There was nothing else that he could think to wish for.
* * *
Thanks to the vast, choppy lake at its doorstep (and the canal extending like a 363-mile drainpipe out the back), Buffalo was one of the richest cities in the United States, Chicago’s closest rival as the Paris of the Plains. Honeymoons were spent there; songs were written extolling its glamour; a belt of steel plants on the city’s south side (if the wind was right) made for hyperbolic, lilac-tinted sunsets. The Great Depression’s scars were freshly healed — or freshly powdered over, better said — and the attitude of the citizenry was one of fierce, bulldoggish confidence. A greater contrast to Vienna was hard to imagine. Sonja was right about that much, Kaspar thought, if nothing else.
As the months went by, my grandfather’s mourning took on a peculiar cast — one that would have been inconceivable before the concept of spacetime was proposed. If time was (as science now insisted) best understood as a fourth dimension, then it was erroneous to think of past events as having ceased to be. The past, Kaspar reasoned, is most accurately conceived of as a continent we’ve emigrated from, or better still as a kind of archipelago: a series of nearly contiguous islands, self-contained and autonomous, that we’re constantly in the process of forsaking, simply by moving through time. Like all things past, his wife existed in a zone of the continuum that was inaccessible to him now. This by no means meant that she no longer was.
On occasion — after a nightcap or two, or on a day when the twins had been especially good — this way of thinking actually brought him comfort.
He had a great deal to live for, he reminded himself. He could have stayed in Vienna if he’d wanted to die, and saved himself and his girls (not to mention poor Wilhelm) a great deal of trouble. “But they couldn’t snuff us, those goddamn death fetishists,” he’d growl at my father years later, his tongue primed by sweet British sherry. “We Tollivers are too inquisitive to die.”
Buffalo Bill was a “confirmed bachelor”—with all the quirks and predilections that implied in that era — but he insisted on taking his cousin-in-law, on the second and fourth Friday of each month, to Feinberg’s Star Burlesque Revue downtown. Wilhelm showed less interest in the gambolings onstage than if he’d been at a lecture on personal hygiene, but there was no doubt that the place excited him. He seemed intoxicated by the spotlights and the wine-dark velvet seats, by the cackling and the coarse talk of the crowd, and he barely breathed until the houselights came back up. My grandfather (who enjoyed the show for less poetic reasons) wondered what it was that thrilled his cousin-in-law so deeply, but he resisted the urge to inquire. An important clue, however, was provided in the person of the balcony usher, a Polish kid with thick blond curls and eyes the depthless green of Nordsee ice. There always seemed to be some confusion about their seats when they sat in the balcony, and the usher’s help was invariably required. “I’d give anything on earth to look like that,” Wilhelm murmured one evening, watching the boy make his way nimbly back to the aisle. “Anything.” Kaspar struggled to come up with a suitable answer, then quickly realized that none was necessary. His cousin-in-law had been talking to himself.