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Angela got up, too. “I was just going there,” she said.
Maimee was standing behind the kitchen door with a frightened face and folded arms, stunned by the tantrum she’d heard. “We thought he’d be grateful,” she told Angela. “And the money was so good.”
“Which newspaper?” Angela asked.
“The New York American.”
They heard Alois telling Adolf, “But I say how good and generous you were as a boy!”
“And what about my childhood ‘fantasy life’? Am I in fact ‘far removed from reality’? Even your lies are idiotic! Sweeping streets for food in Wien? Working in München as a house painter? A wallpaper hanger?”
“They put words in my mouth,” Alois said.
Geli found dinner napkins and rolled them inside porcelain rings. She said, “Who’d have guessed a family outing could be so much fun?”
“He’s under a lot of strain,” Angela said.
“Why do you always apologize for him?” her daughter asked.
“Well, he’s a genius,” Angela said. “They’re all high-strung.”
“Hah,” Geli said. She held open the kitchen door and peered out.
Wallowing in self-pity, Hitler clamped his forehead with his left hand as he whined, “Oh, how carefully I have always kept my personal affairs out of the press! And now people are trying to find out who I am! In my book I did not say a word about my ancestry or my family or my childhood friends, not a word, and now investigations are being made and spies are sent out to dig up our past! Even a breath of scandal will destroy all I have worked so hard for!”
Maimee got out coffee cups and saucers and Geli carried them to the dining room in a “Don’t mind me” way as her uncle, who seemed precariously near tears, shouted that he was henceforth disclaiming Alois and Willie as his relations. If his sister could assume the name Paula Wolf and hide from the press in Wien, then Alois could say he was adopted by his father, that he and Adolf were unrelated. And Willie could go back to England and tell the Hearst people that he’d found out he’d made a horrible mistake, his uncle was another Hitler, and the famous Adolf Hitler was not family at all.
Angela walked out. “Hot coffee!”
Seemingly forgetting his anger, Hitler grinned. “And cake, I hope?”
“She made one fresh this morning, just for you.”
With childish pleasure, Hitler hopped up from the sofa and flattered Maimee as Alois and Willie shared a look of surprise. Geli whispered to Willie in English, “Hot and cold. Off and on. Black and white.”
Adolf ate three pieces of cake in silence as Alois and Angela talked about old times, and then as Alois played with their nine-year-old, Adolf felt restless and proposed that the family all take a stroll through the Tiergarten.
Geli said her throat still hurt
and Willie opted to stay with her in the flat, listening to the BBC on Alois’s radio: “Am I Blue,” “You Do Something to Me,” “Can’t We Be Friends?” Willie finally took off his jacket and shoes around five and fell heavily onto the sofa next to Geli. She sucked on a lozenge. She could feel him hunting for words, and then in English he said, “I hope you won’t think me too forward, but you’re really smashing, you know. You’re really the nicest of all the family.”
“Thank you.”
“I have a girlfriend of my own, in case you were wondering.”
She said in English, “That is good for you, yes?”
“Oh indeed. Quite satisfying.” With shock at himself, he added, “Not physically. We’re not—”
She smiled. “I understand.”
“Embraceable You” was playing, and they listened to it for a while before Willie said, “Uncle Adolf can be rather unpredictable, can’t he? Emotionally, I mean.”
“You get used to,” she said.
“What’s he like?”
She laughed when she thought about it. “A crocodile. Waiting and waiting. And then, in a blitz, the scurry forward. Und die Zähne.”
