The Danish Girl

tell him that she hadn’t painted since she left Denmark. She didn’t want to write about the weather; that was something her mother would do. Instead she wrote letters about what she would do when she returned to Copenhagen: re-enroll in the Royal Academy; try to arrange a little exhibit of her paintings at Den Frie Udstilling; convince Einar to escort her to her nineteenth birthday party. During her first month in California she would walk to the post office on Colorado Street to mail the letters. “Could be slow,” the clerk would say through the brass slats in the window. And Greta would reply, “Don’t tell me the Germans have now also ruined the mail!”

She couldn’t live like this, she told one of the Japanese maids, Akiko, a girl with a runny nose. The maid bowed and brought Greta a camellia floating in a silver bowl. Something is going to have to change, Greta told herself as she burned up with anger, although she was mad at no one in particular, except the Kaiser. There she was, the freest girl in Copenhagen, if not the whole world, and now that dirty German had just about ruined her life! An exile-that’s what she’d become. Banished to California, where the rosebushes grew to ten feet and the coyotes in the canyon cried at night. She could hardly believe that she had become the type of girl who looked forward to nothing more in the day than when the mail arrived, a bundle of envelopes, none of them from Einar.

She cabled her father, begging for his permission to return to Denmark. “The sea lanes are no longer safe,” was his answer. She demanded that her mother let her go up to Stanford with Carlisle, but her mother said the only schools appropriate for Greta were the Seven Sisters back in the snowy East.

“I feel like I’m being crushed,” she told her mother.

“Don’t be so dramatic,” Mrs. Waud replied, busy managing the re-seeding of the winter lawns and the poppy beds.

One day Akiko tapped delicately on Greta’s door and, with her head bowed, brought Greta a pamphlet. “I am sorry,” Akiko said. Then she rushed out, her getas clacking. The pamphlet announced the next meeting of the Pasadena Arts & Crafts Society. Greta thought about the society’s amateurs with their Paris-style palettes and threw away the pamphlet. She turned to her sketch pad but could think of nothing to draw.

A week later, Akiko returned to her door. She handed Greta a second pamphlet. “I am sorry,” Akiko said, her hand covering her mouth. “But I think you like.”

It was only after Akiko delivered a third pamphlet that Greta decided to attend a meeting. The society owned a bungalow above Pasadena in the foothills. The previous week, a mountain lion, as yellow as a sunflower, had pounced down from the scrub pine at the end of the road and snatched a neighbor’s baby. The society’s members could talk of nothing else. The agenda was abandoned, and there was a discussion of a mural depicting the scene. “It’ll be called Lion Descending!” someone said. “Why not a mosaic?” another member proposed. The society was made up mostly of women, but there were a few men, many of whom wore felt berets. As the meeting moved closer to agreeing upon a collective painting to be presented to the city library on New Year’s Day, Greta slipped to the back of the room. She had been right.

“You’re not volunteering?” a man said.

It was Teddy Cross, with his white forehead and long neck that tilted to the left. Teddy Cross, who suggested they leave the meeting and visit his ceramics studio on Colorado Street where his kiln burned walnut logs night and day; whose right ankle was meaty with muscle from pumping the foot pedal of his potter’s wheel. Teddy Cross, who would become Greta’s husband as a result of the Christmas debutante ball at the Valley Hunt Club; who, before the end of the Great War, would die beneath Greta’s gaze.

He was the second man Greta loved. She loved Teddy for the slender-necked vases he shaped out of white clay and ground glass. She loved his quiet, stubbly face and the way his mouth would hang open as he dipped his pottery into tubs of glaze. He was from Bakersfield, the son of strawberry farmers; a childhood of squinting had permanently creased the skin around his eyes. He would ask Greta about Copenhagen, about its canals and its king, but would never comment on anything she told him, his eyelids the only thing moving in his face. She told him there was a great landscape painter there who was in love with her, but Teddy only stared. He ’d never been east of the Mojave, and the only time he was in one of the mansions along Orange Grove Boulevard was when he was hired to create tiles for hearths and sleeping-porch floors.

Greta loved the idea of dating him; of taking him around to the tennis-court pavilions where Pasadena’s dinner dances were held that fall; of showing him off to the girls from the Valley Hunt Club, as if to say she wasn’t one of them, not anymore-she’d lived in Europe, after all. She would climb up in the butcher wagon if she wanted, or she would have a ceramicist as an escort.

As expected, Greta’s mother refused to allow Teddy Cross in the house. But that didn’t stop Greta from touring him around Pasadena, visiting boring Henrietta and Margaret and Dottie Anne in their shade gardens. Those girls didn’t seem to mind Teddy, which Greta took to mean they were actually ignoring him. His ceramics were in such demand that, Greta discovered, there was a respectable charm in the way he arrived at parties with bits of clay jammed beneath his fingernails. Greta’s mother, who would often say at the dinner dances that she’d take California’s terra infirma any day over “old, old Europe,” would pat Teddy’s hand whenever they met in public, a gesture that infuriated Greta. Her mother knew that were she to publicly dismiss Teddy Cross, the dispute would end up in the American Weekly.

“They look down at you,” Greta said to Teddy during one of the parties.

“Only some of them,” he replied, seemingly happy to sit with Greta on the wicker couch out by the swimming pool as the Santa Anas blew palm fronds to the ground and the party burned on in the mansion’s windows. If he only knew! Greta would think, ready to fight-whom or what, she didn’t know, but she was ready.

Then one day the mail arrived in its twine-bound bundle, and Akiko delivered a blue envelope to Greta’s door. She looked at it for a long time, balancing its delicate weight in her palm. She could hardly believe Einar had written, and her mind began to race with what he might have to say to her: It seems as if the War is nearly over and we should be together again by Christmas. Or: I’m coming to California on the next crossing. Or maybe even: Your letters mean more to me than I can say.

It was possible, Greta told herself, the envelope in her lap. He could have changed his mind. Anything was possible.

Then Greta ripped through the seal.

The letter was addressed “Dear Miss Waud,” and said only: “Given the course of events, worldly and otherwise, I expect we will never see each other again, which is probably for the best.”

Greta folded the paper and tucked it into her pocket. Why did Einar think like that? she asked herself, wiping her eyes with the hem of her smock. Why didn’t he have any sense of hope at all? Regretfully, she had no idea what she could do.

Then Akiko returned to Greta’s door and said, “It’s Mr. Cross. On the telephone.”

And so on the telephone in the upstairs hall, within earshot of her mother, Greta asked Teddy to escort her to the debutante ball. He agreed on one condition-that Greta stop worrying about how he’d get along with her mother. “I’m going to ask her to dance with me and then you’ll see,” he said. But Greta rolled her eyes, thinking Teddy didn’t know what he was getting himself into. When she hung up, her mother said only, “Well, now that it ’s done, just be sure to help him with his tails.”

There were seven girls in her debutante class. Their escorts were young men home for the holidays from Harvard and Princeton or from army bases in Tennessee and San Francisco. A girl with asthma asked Carlisle, her lungs too weak to need a reliable dancing partner. And Greta, who was for the first time beginning to think that she would have to forget all about Einar Wegener, prepared by practicing her curtsy.

The white dress with the empire waist never fit Greta right. It was flouncy in the shoulders and a fraction too short, revealing her feet. Or at least that’s how Greta felt about it; she could think only of her long, blocky feet showing when she descended the staircase in the Valley Hunt Club’s front hall. The staircase’s banister was wrapped in a garland twisted with evergreens, apples, and red lilies. Guests in white tie were scattered around the club sipping spiked Tennis Specials, politely watching the seven debutantes descend. There were four Christmas trees up for decoration, and in the fireplaces dark flames were gnawing on the redwood logs.

One of the girls brought a silver flask of whiskey, its cap made of mother-of-pearl. She and the other debs passed it around while they dressed and pinned the poinsettia leaves into their hair. The flask made the evening brighter, as if the club manager had turned up the wall sconces to their highest voltage. It made the black fires in the fireplaces seem almost like beasts about to jump the screens.

When Greta reached the foot of the stairs, she curtsied deeply, bringing her chin to the Oriental carpet. The club members applauded, balancing their punch cups. Then she entered the ballroom, and there, waiting, was