CINDERELLA & HER SISTERS

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CINDERELLA & HER SISTERS

V

Vienna is a city in metamorphosis, Baltazzi thinks. He removes his goggles and attempts to light his first cigar of the afternoon. The Countess has been forced to slow down because of the congestion around them. And all the while he’s looking about him thinking it’s a new city. It’s alive with festivity, celebration, and growth. And so much growth, he thinks as he looks about.

The streets are as crowded and as lively as they've always been, but it's more than that, he tells himself. He watches the electric trams that ply the ringestrasse instead of the horse drawn carriages of his youth—and when he sees a few of the older, more reliable carriages plodding the streets, he feels a sense of nostalgia welling up in his breast—but he's reminded of the new reality when he sees a line of endless automobiles swimming through a sea of humanity at a halting pace, coughing out heavy smoke with a cantankerous rattle. There are dozens of heavy trucks and loaded wagons carrying lumber and coal, and building materials for the city growing up around itself; he wonders how anyone can live like this. It's a city under construction, with cranes, scaffoldings, and workmen—foreigners one and all, he's almost certain—shouting down from the skeletal frames around them.

The Countess pulls over to the side of the road and stops. The traffic comes to a snarling halt behind her as she insists Johanne take over the driving. Baltazzi takes the opportunity to step out himself. He re-lights his cigar and then climbs back into the front seat. The Countess calls out for the girls to follow.

"We'll go by foot from here, Johanne," she says lightly, and Baltazzi looks down at her from the front seat.

"We will?” he stammers.

"The walk will do you good Poppa," she says with a smile, as she takes off her driving gloves and unties her hat. She puts the hat on the back seat. Baltazzi watches as she unwraps the scarf and ties it about her neck lightly, so that the length of it hangs in a shimmer of soft silk down the length of her back. He looks at her and congratulates himself, thinking how the scarf transforms her into an exotic seductress.

“We'll dine at The Strasbourg tonight,” she says to Johanne. “You can pick us up after eight, I think.”

"And what about reservations?" Baltazzi asks, stepping down from the front seat.

"We have them."

"We do? I don't recall making arrangements for dining out."

"Julia made them. Didn’t I tell you?”

"You mean we're meeting them? Tonight? Julia and Randall?”

“Randolf, darling,” she corrects him patiently.

“Dinner? We're not dressed for dinner," Anastasia says.

"Nonsense. Of course we are,” the Countess says.

“How can you say that? Look at what we're wearing! You told us to dress for the ride out of the country, and, well, we look like we just came in from the country. Now you're telling us that we're going out for dinner. What will people say when they see us sitting in our riding clothes in a restaurant? We’ll be a laughing stock.”

"Fine," the Countess says as she takes her lace gloves out of her small bag. "I suppose we'll just have to go shopping. Do you think we can find something for you to wear in time for dinner tonight?"

"What about us?" Collette asks.

"We're going shopping?" Baltazzi asks at the same time. "I knew I should have sent the luggage ahead yesterday, instead of letting old Hans ride in with it today."

"Oh Poppa, don't fret. Besides, now's the perfect opportunity to start looking for Stacey's trousseau--"

"Oh Momma, do you mean it?"

"I'm not fretting," Baltazzi says, trying to ignore Anastasia who’s too excited to care about anything now. "I just had no idea that I'd be following the four of you through the streets of Vienna, serving as a pack animal."

"It won't be that bad. We're not going to buy the store out."

"Buy the store out? You sound like you all ready know where you want to go."

"Poppa," she laughs. "Of course I know where I want to go," she says as she reaches under the seat and pulls out her parasol.

"I never stood a chance, did I?" Baltazzi says to Johanne when he sees the parasol.

"No," she smiles, and picking up her dress, she steps to the sidewalk and brushes dust from the hem. "But Stacey's right. This just won't do. Are you ready girls?"

With the Emperor celebrating his sixtieth Jubilee, the people are just as excited for him, as they are for themselves, Baltazzi realizes as they press themselves along the wide sidewalk. There's a sense of celebration here that transcends anything the city’s known before—probably going all the way back to the Congress of Vienna, he tells himself. There's been little worth celebrating in Vienna since those heady times, he thinks, and smiles seeing how the Countess is just as excited about being in the city, as the girls are.

The buildings along the ringestrasse are garlanded and festooned with brilliant flowers; wreaths and streamers run from building to building, and hanging from the new electric lamp posts. The trams are all newly painted with bright, lively colours, the brass rails shining as bright as gold in the late afternoon sun. There are flowers in every shop window, as flags flutter in the warm spring air and the distant sound of bands play in the parks. The Countess says there are parades in the streets every day, and sometimes twice a day, and Collette asks her how she knows that, to which the Countess responds that Lady Pritchard has written to her six times over the last month. This has all the earmarkings of a planned afternoon, Baltazzi tells himself, as he falls in behind the girls and lets them drift ahead.

A regatta of smaller ships are lined up in the Donau Canal—magnificent pleasure yachts that lay hove to beside rusted merchant ships, and Baltazzi recognizes the Kaiser's personal yacht Meteor—while on the Danube itself, German, French, and English Dreadnought-class battleships, destroyers, cruisers, and various other craft, have made their way up from the Black Sea where they once lay at anchor, and now belching out thick clouds of black smoke like an assembly of old men meeting over lunch.

Baltazzi lived in Vienna for most of his life, but now, it strikes him as something like a fairy-tale kingdom. To him, now that he's no longer a part of it, the hills and woods seem peopled with castles and toy soldiers on display, like something out of the Brothers Grimm, or maybe an Anderson fairy tale. In his youth, Baltazzi often made his way to the summit of the Leopoldsberg, along the newly made Road of Heights. There, a red-marked foot path crossed the wooded area that lay between the two peaks of Leopoldsberg and the Kahlenberg, and Baltazzi would take to the steps with all the energy of youth, or the vitality of a man in search of a lost love. The woods were full of silver birch, beech, oak, and evergreens then; there was always a buzz of insects and birds that filled the air with the dainty melody song, while the delicate scent of Spring seemed to echo through the hills. The sun came through the trees like splintered shafts of silver, and Baltazzi remembers looking up at the dizzying heights of the trees around him and marvelling that the city had managed to keep this part of the world alive for so long. He wonders if he will be able to recapture that same feeling; he wonders if that part of his youth is still alive, and as he looks at the growing city around him he doubts if anything is left.

There was a small restaurant at the height of the summit then, and standing out on the balcony Baltazzi remembers how he could see all of Vienna as it spread out below him. It was a spectacular view, and he remembers seeing the Church of St. Stephen with its Gothic steeples rising up in the distance, looking gold and green beside the ornate buildings of the ringstrasse. (It was a building he could see from any part of the city at one time, but now, it's lost somewhere behind the new construction.) The Danube shimmered softly in the distance then too, and not the dull grey hue that bisects the city like a sinewy ribbon of cold steel like it does now, but bright, and blue, and surging full of life. Three high powered telescopes stood along the rails of the balcony and overlooked the Woods below. To the south flowed the Wien, the unofficial dividing line between the old Austrian Empire and the new--where the Romantic pageantry of the Vienna Woods unfolded amidst a splendour of haunting cliffs and wide open gullies. To the east, the Vienna basin--where they have just come from—a plain where the Leitha Hills stand up like a low barrier in front of the open Hungarian steppes.

It was a different world back then, Baltazzi thinks with a touch of melancholy, and then he looks at the girls and wonders what sort of world they will inherit. They're walking with the Countess, looking into shop windows, all four of them as excited as school girls, and Baltazzi lets them move farther ahead of him. He watches the men as they pause to watch them—all of them tipping their hats, smiling, or nodding their heads politely—and he feels a certain pride welling up in his breast for his girls, and he should be proud he realizes. At forty-two, the Countess might be mistaken for an older sister, and Annette, the youngest at sixteen, a woman instead of the young girl she is. A part of him wants to protect them—to protect her a voice says from somewhere in the back of his mind—but he knows he shouldn't worry; they're more than capable of taking care of themselves he knows. They all speak their own minds, offer their own opinions, and stand up for themselves no matter the consequences—well, the younger two more than Stacey, Baltazzi reminds himself—and while he knows that most men are intimidated by that sort of a woman, he also knows that’s the sort of women who attract stronger men.