“Oh dear.”
Angela thought of him as a misogynist; she wondered if he’d ever even held hands with a girl. She smiled and said, “You shock me, Adolf.”
“I have no interest in contracting syphilis, I assure you. In fact, August and I have solemnly vowed to keep forever pure the holy flame of life. But if it is my goal to form the ideal state, I have an obligation to investigate from afar those festering and illicit monuments to the perversion of our times.”
Aunt Johanna frowned. “Who can fathom what you’re talking about?”
Angela grinned at Geli, who was forgetting to nurse, lost in a fog, her tiny and affectionate hand as delicate as a moth on the huge white urn of Angela’s breast. Was it possible to feel more love than this for a child and not faint with ecstasy? Would there ever be a time when Angelika was not essential to her? She heard the three men howling in the kitchen and she wondered if whatever was said was truly funny, or was it Leo’s Schadenfreude? Leo who clapped when waiters dropped plates, who found all falls hilarious, who often teased children to tears; Leo who first got interested in Angela Hitler because he’d heard she was fine Hausfrau material and a jolly woman who loved to have a good laugh. She was twenty then, and strong and pretty in a square-jawed way, and oh so eager to get out of her stepmother’s house. And now she was twenty-five and, she thought, much had changed.
Aunt Johanna was talking, and then Adolf. Angela heard him say, “We face a gloomy interior courtyard. Even in the afternoon I have to light a stinking kerosene lamp in order to sketch.”
Angela asked her half-brother, “Why aren’t you painting at the academy of fine arts?” And she heard a shifty moment of quiet before she looked up to find that Adolf had turned from the dining room window with his hand inside his jacket. Crossing spitefully to her, he pulled out a folded sheet of paper that he sarcastically ironed out on the sofa arm next to Geli’s head.
“Official judgment,” it read. “Adolf Hitler, born Braunau am Inn, Upper Austria, on 20 April 1889. Religion: Catholic. Father: civil servant (deceased). Education: four forms, Realschule. Sample drawings: Inadequate; few heads.”
“You weren’t accepted?”
“You’re quick, aren’t you, Angela.”
“Oh, Adolf. I’m so sorry. Was there nothing you could do?”
Aunt Johanna offered, “Learn to draw heads?”
Controlling his temper, he said, “I went to the director. Professor Siegmund l’Allemand. A Jew. He thought I had little talent for painting, but ought to consider the school of architecture.”
“And?”
“I admitted I quit taking classes here at sixteen and didn’t have my diploma.” And then, his face flushed as if he were seething, he began ranting first about the intransigence of the officials at the grueling four-hour exam, and then about their being petty bureaucrats, all of them old-fashioned, fossilized civil servants. Without taste, without fairness, without common sense. With no loyalty to their heritage.
Aunt Johanna sighed. “You realize, of course, that if you’d studied at a technical school you’d have matriculated by now? But no, you’re an artist, you won’t listen to anybody. You’re as pigheaded as your father was. You go your own way, thinking of no one else, just as if you had no family. My sister died six months ago, and this is your first visit.”
Hitler fell melodramatically to his knees before her and in a high, whining, sniveling voice, his face rolling against Aunt Johanna’s thigh, confessed his failings, his fecklessness, his fruitless talent; confessed, too, that it was shame and vanity and his wanting so desperately to please her that had frustrated his good intentions. And now he felt doomed to waste his life in the filth of questionable surroundings, frostbitten in winter, feeble in the heat of summer, his youth wholly lost, penniless but for the paintings he sold and too proud to ask for financial assistance, having only Sorrow and Need for companions.
Aunt Johanna softly petted his hair. “There, there now,” she said.
Angela thought, The Mommy routine. While growing up with him, she’d all too often watched Klara give way to his miserable abjection and lamentations, and now she could abide no more. She buttoned her dress, lifted Geli to her dish-toweled left shoulder, and gently patted the baby’s back as she walked to the kitchen.
The monsignor was wiping tears of laughter from his eyes and her husband was fully intoxicated and addleheaded on the floor. Angela got a platter of Russian eggs from the icebox and put a jar of gherkins next to it on the kitchen table. Leo got up, filled his mouth with an egg, and hunted in the gherkin jar with his fingers. Angela got out a fork. August Kubizek was sitting beside the kitchen sink, saying, “No sooner do we go partners on a ten-kronen lottery ticket than Adolf begins fantasizing that we’ve already won. A sure thing. Endless talki
ng about how we’d rent a house across the Danube, he’d furnish it to his own taste, paint his own trompe l’oeil on the walls, make the house our own conservatory. We’d also hire a lady of exquisite culture and placid temperament to be our chatelaine. Elderly, of course; for as he put it, he wanted ‘no prospects to be aroused of a kind unwelcome to us.’”
Raubal winked as he asked, “Could it be young Hitler has a religious calling, Monsignor?”
“You give me goose flesh, Herr Raubal.” The old priest peered through the bottom half of his glasses at the baby girl and smiled as he petted her flossy brown hair with his hand. “She’s fallen asleep,” he whispered.
“I’d better go put her down.”
Kubizek was saying, “And then when the lottery winner was announced, and it wasn’t us, Adolf was destroyed. Annihilated. It was unjust, he shouted. Authorities had stolen the prize from us. All he could do was lie in a dark room for two days. And I realized, ‘What a fantastic imagination! Others’ wildest dreams are reality to him!’”
Angela walked to the hallway just as Leo Junior was toddling out of the children’s bedroom, crabby with wakefulness. After she put Geli down in the crib, she hiked Leo up on her hip so the two-year-old could rest his forearms and chin on the railing and watch his sister doze for a while, her cheeks working furiously on her thumb. Then Angela changed and groomed her son, and took him to the kitchen like a gift, but found that Hitler had taken off his jacket because of the heat and had moved from Aunt Johanna to the company of men.
The monsignor was saying, “And confirmation was worse. Whitsunday, 1903, 1904?”
Without interest, Hitler said, “1904.”
“Of all the boys being confirmed, he was the sulkiest, the most unpleasant, the most ill-prepared; as if religion were a giant bore for him, and confirmation repugnant. We had to drag the words out of his mouth.” The monsignor filled his stein again as he asked, “You don’t go to Mass or confession anymore, I’ll wager.”
Scoffing at the notion, Hitler said, “I have been a pagan all my life.”