Holy Skirts - Hardcover

Steinke, Rene

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0688176941 ISBN 13: 9780688176945

Verlag: William Morrow, 2005

Inhaltsangabe

In 1917 no one had ever seen a woman like the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. She regally stalked the streets of Greenwich Village wearing a bustle with a flashing taillight, a brassiere made from tomato cans, or a birdcage necklace; declaimed her poems to sailors in beer halls; and enthusiastically modeled in the nude for artists such as Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp, setting the city ablaze with her antics. Before today's outsized celebrities, there was the Baroness -- poet and artist, proto-punk rocker, sexual libertine, fashion avatar, and troublemaker. At the center of the Dadaist circle, the Baroness transformed herself into a living, breathing work of art.

Holy Skirts is a vivid imagining of the Baroness's story. Beginning in 1904, with Elsa's burlesque performance onstage in Berlin's Wintergarten cabaret, the adventures continue across Europe, through turbulent marriages and love affairs, until the Baroness finally lands in New York City, just before America enters the war. As she befriends Greenwich Village artists and writers, she defines herself as a poet, even as she breaks the bonds of female propriety.

In a beautifully written novel, René Steinke paints an exquisite portrait of this woman and her time -- an era of cataclysmic change that witnessed brutal war, technological innovation, the rise of urban living, and an irrevocable shift in the lives of women, who, like Elsa, struggled to create their own destinies. Holy Skirts is a celebration of resilience and imagination, anexploration of the world in which the modern woman was born, and a testament to the lost bohemia.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

René Steinke is the author of The Fires. She is the editor in chief of The Literary Review and teaches creative writing at Fairleigh Dickinson University. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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Holy Skirts

By Steinke, Rene

William Morrow & Company

ISBN: 0688176941

Chapter One

Berlin 1904

Elsa had never been like the other girls she knew, modest and squeamishabout their bodies. Men seemed to sense this. When she was twelve,the doctor, while examining her, had winked and pinched her breasts,and she had been stunned at the sweet stars of pain there, the moist heatbetween her legs. She had been infatuated with him for weeks, inventingfevers and asking him about his ornithology prints on the examining-roomwall. Then there had been the fisherman's son who met her twice at a certainspot in the woods and, laying her down in the leaves, had let her touch hispenis, the little eye with its crumpled pink hood. It amused her the way itstiffened and grew in her hand as if she had commanded it with a spell, andwhen the semen spilled on her arm, it felt like tears. There was the shy milkboy, whom she took behind the house to a little shed where the shovels andgardening tools were kept, and when she put his hand under her skirt, on herthighs above her stockings, he pushed her up against the tines of a rake, butshe did not mind. She had a theory that she simply had more heat in her limbs, more blood than most girls, and sensitive skin (she was also prone to hives and blushes), and so her body's chemistry gave her these pleasures other girls were not so lucky to feel.

At home she had been warned about the sailors who roamed the streetsnear the marina, that they were dangerous and wily. And so at night shewould put on her red chemise and imagine them climbing through her bedroom window, one by one. They would admire her, touch her pale skin, slip a thumb beneath the strap on her shoulder, keeping their voices low so that no one would hear. She fantasized about being kidnapped by a sailor withgreen eyes and sunburned skin. As he was taking her off to China or India,he would tell her about volcanoes, zebras, and pygmies, about the monkey'sbrains and grasshoppers he had eaten. The ocean would spread ahead ofthem in its dark infinity, the moon winking, as he slipped his hand inside thesecret spot where her bodice met the chemise. She finally lost her virginity one night on a rowboat with a boy who smelled of salt and grunted into her hair. The boat rocked, and water splashed over them. Afterward she put her hand in the cool sea and, opening her fingers, imagined her virginity floating away like a lock of hair in the waves.

When she stepped off the hot train, after the five-hour ride fromSwinemünde to Berlin, she realized she had no idea where to go. It was a gray day in January, the air cold and still. As Elsa wandered the streets, her duffel bag slung over her shoulder, she kept an eye out for landmarks from her earlier visits -- that giant pockmarked door that opened onto a courtyard of discarded wheels, the candy shop with the bonbons like tiny breasts. She looked for the dark cathedral with its low, despairing bells but found herself on a strange street of vegetable carts and stores selling pots and pans.

She was nineteen years old, tall and long-limbed. In a hat that fell low onher brow, she walked with a gangly abruptness that made her skirt appear tostop and then start again suddenly, sweeping the pavement in odd bursts ofmovement. People rushed past her, their faces pressed into mufflers and coatlapels, and on the street smoky plumes rose up from the horses' nostrils. Shehad not thought it would be so difficult to find a place to stay the night, having imagined she would stay at the Bristol Hotel, where she had alwaysstayed before with her mother, but now she couldn't find it.

When her fingers turned numb and her nose was running, she hurriedinto a café, the door's bells clattering after her. Green and red bottles behind the bar gleamed, and the air smelled of licorice. "I need a boardinghouse," she said to the woman.

"Down that way," the woman said, pointing toward the church. "Is FrauHoffman's. She might have a room."

Elsa went to the address and knocked on the door of a tall, narrow housewith pointed eaves.

Elsa had assumed she could survive for a year or more on the money shehad brought. She also had her notebook, three books of poetry, an extradress, her favorite yellow shoes, and that last gift from her mother, whichshe didn't have a name for yet -- all that she could fit in the bag when sheclimbed out the window of her bedroom and ran for the train.

She was shocked when Frau Hoffman asked for almost all the moneyremaining in her purse.

"For the first month's rent." Her loose cheeks flapped like dog earsaround her mouth, but her face turned hard when she spoke of money. "Andafter this, always on the first Friday."

She showed Elsa to a small room with a bed, a dresser, and a chippedwashstand. The bedspread was gray with city ash. "You'll share the toiletand bath with the two others on this floor -- they're nice girls, seamstresses."

In the parlor, crowded with dark furniture and black-faced china dolls, FrauHoffman sat in a chair with a high back like a throne. She took Elsa's moneyand put it in an envelope that she sealed. "Now, don't tell me where you go atnight. If someone comes looking for you, I don't want to have to lie."

Elsa's throat clenched. She had never known a woman as old as FrauHoffman who did not watch girls, waiting for them to make a mistake. "Noone will be looking for me." She tried not to think of her father's threats ...

Continues...

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Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: William Morrow
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2005
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0688176941
• ISBN 13: 9780688176945
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 368
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar