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 talking 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.”
Raubal hit him on the head with the flat of his hand.
“Ow!” Hitler said, and worried his hair.
“Monsignor is trying to save your soul.”
The old priest turned to Raubal. “At the confirmation party he ran outside to play Red Indians with nine-year-olds. And him fifteen.”
“It’s of a piece,” Raubal said.
“Leo,” Angela cautioned, “manners.” She turned to Adolf. She was six years older than her half-brother and fondly remembered the sunny days when she’d put him in a stroller and parade with him, pretending he was her child. Ever since then she’d been able to forgive him anything. She touched his wrist. “Are you hungry, Adolf?”
Her half-brother unhappily examined the potatoes in jackets, the cold kielbasa, the Russian eggs, the gherkins, the herring rolls, a hunk of Gouda cheese, and, complaining that it was Jewish food, asked Angela to please make him Mehlspeise, a flour-based, meatless dish.
She was heading to the pantry when Raubal shouted, “Don’t cook for him! Eat what we eat, Adolf!”
Kubizek finished his beer and stood. “You have a piano. Why don’t I play us something?”
Excitedly, Hitler said, “We’ll do a duet!”
The party moved to the front room where there was a magnificent Heitzmann