The whole party shook itself out. The women straightened their skirts and blew what they hoped would be cooler air on each other’s necks; the men wiped their wet foreheads with folded handkerchiefs and replaced their hats. They turned at the same time and smiled their respects to the estate steward, who had a broken neck and wore a cast like a white chimney. Close behind him came a thin man in country tweeds; he looked to them more English than German, because of all the aristocratic British scoundrels they had seen in films. He strolled down to them with his feet hidden in a low cloud of house dogs, who did not let up barking. He was not English, of course, but as removed from them as any foreigner might have been. He spoke with such a correct and beautiful accent that Grandmother could make out only a word or two. She looked away, blushed, and performed a deep curtsy.
Jürgen muttered, “The family came for the drive,” to which the steward said affably that they could visit, with a great wave that seemed to waft them up the green hill and indoors.
“The castle is a museum,” said Uncle Bebo. He was the only one in the family who had traveled much in peacetime.
Uncle Ludwig, who always sounded like a piece of metal machinery, said, “Yes — visit!” which was something of an order. He and his man Jürgen had come here to see about buying thousands of Christmas trees for the market next December. The steward, part of whose job it was to talk about money, removed himself to an alley of lime trees with the horrible Jürgen, while Uncle Ludwig and the thin man sat down on a stone bench carved with pineapples and began a discussion about the cathedral at Freiburg. Uncle Ludwig did not know if he had ever seen the cathedral or only pictures of it, and did not care whether he had or had not. Now that he was rich he was not thought ignorant anymore, but simply eccentric. He sat patiently, letting Jürgen get on with it.
The rest of the party marched on to the castle, led by Uncle Bebo. Knowing about museums, Uncle Bebo had some loose change ready, five marks in all, with which to tip the guide. It was a long walk, all uphill. The hot weather, plus Uncle Bebo’s jokes, made them feel silly and drunk. Giggling and hitting each other, they trooped in and up a great flight of stairs — Uncle Bebo said that in castle-museums the ticket office was one floor up. They opened doors on museum rooms furnished to look as if someone lived in them. Uncle Bebo fingered the draperies and even tried the beds, while Aunt Barbara, who had one problem on outings, and one only, began to look for a sign saying LADIES.
“That will be downstairs,” much-traveled Uncle Bebo said. He led the descent, opened another great door, and saw what he took to be the staff of the museum eating lunch. He swung his arm back, the confident gesture of a know-it-all, and the others followed him into a large dining room where some ten or twelve persons of all ages stared back at them without speaking.
“Good appetite!” the visitors cried. They urged the staff to take no notice, please — to eat up their veal and dumplings while the dish was still hot. Uncle Bebo tried to see if the guide to be tipped was here, but none of the stunned faces showed the required signs of leadership. The men at lunch wore country jackets with bone buttons. The women seemed so dowdy that nobody remembered later what they were wearing. The visitors were in their Sunday urban best — meaning, for the aunts, pinkish nylon stockings, flowered drip-dry frocks, white no-iron cardigans, Aunt Barbara in a no-iron skirt from Italy and shoes with needle heels and her hair rolled up in blond thimbles. The men wore high collars and stiff shiny ties, had hair newly trimmed so that a crescent of skin left each ear looking stranded. The men smelled of aftershave lotion — lilac and carnation — that they’d been given last Christmas by the family women.
The visitors followed Uncle Bebo once around the table. They paused when he did, to squint at an oval portrait, nodded when he said, “Baroque!” and cried out with wonder at the sweet bell-tone when he snapped his fingernails on a crystal punch bowl — all the while renewing their smiles and encouraging remarks to the staff. Finally all headed toward another door at the end of the room. This one had a pointed lintel beneath which Uncle Bebo paused for the last time. He raised his fist (still clenched around the five marks), looked up at the lintel, back at the frozen people of all ages clutching their knives and forks, did not cry, “Death to upper-class swine!” as they might have feared in their collective bad dream, but only, “This door is Gothic! No mistake!” and led the visitors on, the marks in his knuckles going cling-cling-cling. Granny turned back, smiled, curtsied deeply, and gave them a blessing.
Now they began to look for THIS WAY OUT, for there had not been all that much to see in the museum. Aunt Barbara was still watching for the door she wanted. Uncle Bebo clamped his teeth together and made a hissing sound to torment Aunt Barbara, so that she couldn’t stop laughing, which was no help either. All at once they were outside again in the handsome park, with Aunt Barbara searching hard for a row of shrubs or a tree large enough to conceal her. As soon as she saw what she needed she cried to her mother-in-law, “Oh, Granny, a lovely tree, a thick fat beautiful tree,” and galloped off, hiking up her Italian pleated skirt. The grandmother was slower, bothered by her long petticoats — two of them navy blue, two of white linen-and-cotton, one of lawn — and mysterious bloomers that were long in the leg and had never been seen by her own daughters: They were washed apart, hung to dry between pillowcases, and ironed by Granny in the dead of night.
Granny grasped the edge of the innermost petticoat. The trick was to bundle all the other skirts within it and hang on to the hem with her teeth. Just as she had a good hold on the hem she happened to see two boys of sixteen or so running with large black dogs on leads in and out of shade down the sloping lawn. The dogs were barking and the boys were calling to the women, “Stop! Stop!”
But then from far away, from within the alley of lime trees, another cry sounded, and, running too, breaking free of the trees, came the steward, the horrible Jürgen, then sly-eyed Uncle Ludwig, and the owner of the trees with his little cloud of house dogs. Before these two parties could meet and lambaste each other with sticks and fists it was established that the ugliest of the intruders — Uncle Ludwig — was that godsent figure who might purchase thousands of Christmas trees. The boys backed off, pulled their dogs in short, and said, “We didn’t know.”
Aunt Barbara seemed thoroughly pleased to see everyone; she always liked a crowd. But she was bothered because her skirt was not hanging as she wanted it to, her undergarments having become tangled and twisted. She had to unzip the placket of her skirt, so that it looked as if she meant to take it off; but all she did was give a good wiggle and shake, and when everything had settled she zipped it up again and cried, “Oh, the dear sweet beautiful dogs!” So everything ended well, and as the two boys led Granny back up to the little castle, through the still sunny day filled with such exquisite green lights and shadows, she could be heard saying that she had known all along it could not have been a museum; the beds looked too soft.