He wondered if he had grown up in another time or place—among a different, silent people—his discomfort would never have been noticed. But in Vienna, among the eloquent, where frivolity had been cultivated into a faith, he knew that others saw him falter. Lucius: the name, chosen by his father after the legendary kings of Rome, itself was mockery; he was anything but light. By his thirteenth birthday, so terrified by his mother’s disapproval, so increasingly uncertain of anything to say at all, his unease began to appear in a quiver of his lip, a nervous twisting of his fingers, and at last, a stutter.
In the beginning, he had been accused of feigning. Stutters appear in childhood, his mother told him, not in a boy his age. He didn’t stutter when he was alone, nor when he spoke of his science magazines or the bird’s nest outside his window. Nor did it afflict him at the aquarium in the Imperial Zoological Collections, where he went to stare for hours at the Grottenolm, blind, translucent salamanders from the Southern Empire, in whom one could watch the magical pulsing of their blood.
But at last, conceding that something might be wrong, she hired a speech expert from Munich, famous for his Textbook of the Disorders of Speech and Language and a metal device called the Zungenapparat, which isolated the labial, palatal, and glottal movements from one another and so promised the repair of sound and speech.
The doctor arrived on a warm summer’s morning, gnawing a hangnail. Humming, he appraised the child, palpating his neck and peering into his ears. There were measurements, sour fingers probed his gums; his mother grew bored and left. At last, the apparatus was applied, and the boy was told to sing “The Happy Hiker.”
He tried. The clamp pinched his lips. The tongue prongs cut, and he spat blood. “Louder!” cried the doctor. “It is working!” His mother returned to find her son baying like a dog, mouth foaming red. Lucius looked between them—Mother—Doctor—Mother—Doctor—as his mother seemed to grow bigger and pinker and the doctor smaller and paler. Oh, you have no idea what you have gotten yourself into, thought the boy, watching the man. And he began to giggle—not an easy task with a Zungenapparat—as the doctor gathered up his tools and fled.
A second doctor tried to hypnotize him, failed, and prescribed herring for oral lubrication. A third, cupping his testicles, declared them sufficient, but finding no movement when the boy was shown the fleshy gymnastics in an illustrated edition of True Secrets of the Convent, he removed his notebook and scrawled “Insufficiency of the Gland.” Then he whispered to Lucius’s mother.
A week later, she had his father take him to a house specializing in virgins, certificated free of syphilis, where he was locked in the plush Ludwig II suite with a country girl from Croatia attired like a singer of the opera buffa. As she was from the south, Lucius asked her if she had heard of the Grottenolm. Yes, she said, her frightened face brightening. Her father had once collected the little salamanders to sell to aquaria across the Empire. Then the two of them marveled at this coincidence of their lives, for, just that week, one of Lucius’s favorites in the Zoological Collection had spawned.
Afterward, when his father asked, “And did you do it?” Lucius answered, “Yes, Father.” And his father, “I don’t believe you. What did you do?” And Lucius, “I did what was to be done.” And his father, “Which is what?” And Lucius, “What I have learned.” And his father, “What have you learned, boy?” And Lucius, remembering a novel of his sister’s, answered, “I have done it in a fiery way.”
“That’s my son,” his father said.
In silence, he endured his parents’ receptions until they allowed him to escape. He would have skipped them altogether, but his mother said the guests would think she was like Walentyna Rozorovska, who hid her crippled daughter in a crate. So Lucius followed as she made her rounds. She was distinctly proud of her narrow waist, and he thought she sometimes kept him near because nothing pleased her more than to have another woman say: “Agnieszka, after six children—so sportive! How can it be?”
Whalebone! Lucius wished to shout. The conversation horrified him. He thought such comments about his birth were vulgar, as if they were complimenting her on her genitalia. He was relieved when she spoke instead of music and architecture, and showed particular interest in the industrialists’ wives and where their husbands had been traveling, and it was only when he was older that he realized how strategic, and ultimately ruthless, such questioning had been.
The King is always hunting, and the Queen is always pregnant, ran the joke about his family, paraphrasing Goethe. But he thought, In many ways, this Queen is both. His sweet-toothed father, a major in the lancers, had been shot in the hip by the Italians at the Battle of Custoza, and had intended to spend the rest of his life happily lounging about his garrison in Kraków, drinking slivovitz and perfecting hand shadows to scare his children. For the first decade of his marriage, fearing disruption to his idyll, the war hero tried to hide the sleepy family mines from Lucius’s mother. Iron? There? Nothing but bat droppings. Copper? Oh, my dear, that’s just a silly rumor. What, they told you there was zinc?
He had known his wife too well. No sooner did she have her hands on the balance sheets than a great rumbling was heard over southern Poland. Within three years, the Krzelewski mines had gone from providing buttons for the army’s tunics and brass for its trumpets to steel and iron for the new railway to Zakopane. Soon she had moved them to Vienna so as to better grip the heart of Empire. It was only fitting, she liked to say. Vienna owed her family, ever since Sobieski liberated Austria from the Turks.
This of course was mentioned only in private. In public, she had no hesitation acquiring the necessary imperial trappings. Commemorative ceramics from Franz Josef’s jubilees soon graced their mantelpieces. She had Klimt paint her portrait, first with Lucius at her side, and then, because she was enthralled by the patterns of gold on the portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, she had Lucius painted over. Their dynasty of Irish wolfhounds—Puszek I (1873–81), Puszek II (1880–87), Puszek III (1886–96), Puszek IV (1895–1902), etc.—all descended from none other than Empress Sisi’s beloved Shadow.
Each of her children, save the eldest, had been born in Vienna. Władysław, Kazimierz, and Bolesław, Sylwia and Regelinda: names like a procession of Polish saints. By his second decade, they had all moved on. Later Lucius would learn that there were divisions among them, deep divisions, but for most of his childhood, their unity seemed impenetrable. The men drank and the women played piano very well. The men, disappearing with his father on predawn hunts from their estates in Poland and Hungary, drank a lot.
He was not surprised, therefore, that when he had first announced his intention to study medicine, his mother told him it was a field for arrivistes.
He responded that many sons of nobility became doctors. But he knew the answer before it was uttered from her thin, drawn lips.
“Yes. But our kind of doctor is not the kind of doctor you will be.”
She relented in the end. Better than anyone, she knew his limitations. Alone in the beginning, unwelcome in the German medical student associations, he had found Feuermann and Kaminski similarly excluded, trying to hide their discomfort as the other students laughed among themselves.