I was trying to say that she convinced Bill that she was only playing at being a seductress, and she was actually trying hard to get information out of Kiesl and anyone else. In reality, she’d fallen for this Artist.
And no, it’s not out of the question that even an Austrian might be a devoted Nazi; the linked commentary suggests that it would even be more likely. She didn’t know, though - she just fell head-over-heels for this enemy officer who she’s supposed to be getting intelligence out of.
Basically we’ve spent about 8 months watching a bitter old woman tell her daughter - in psyche-searing levels of TMI detail, which Juliette comments on at least once - exactly how she messed up in her duty in gaining intelligence on the Nazi forces, years later bedded the guy that she failed to investigate properly, tearfully dumped him because it was her duty to be with Bill (oh sure, now she does her “job”), and oh yeah, you’re half-Aryan, your dad never knew that, and your bio-dad didn’t know he had fathered a daughter.
Well, those remain to be seen. We haven’t found out Bill’s condition vis-a-vis fatherhood yet, so he may have been totally aware that he couldn’t be her father. Likewise, Edie may have let Kiesl know at some point that he was a papa. I guess we’ll find out over the next 18 months as this story wraps up.
Speaking of slow storytelling, I pretty much ignored Pibgorn for the duration of the Midsummer Night’s Eve retelling. I’ve read the play before and saw no need to watch it get strung out over a period of months.
Mm, good point. He might have figured that there was no way in hell that baby was a month premature (or whatever). In that case, maybe he figured he wasn’t very wise in his insistence that she not be told that he was alive, and he should be happy that he managed to win her over in the end. And I kind of assumed this was a “and I never saw or heard from him again” parting, but true, we may have many more strips of wrap-up to go yet.
The morality of this story is just so twisted and creepy. Edie wasn’t qualified to be a spy. The Germans immediately made her, and everyone else in camp thought she was a whore. Sending her in was a serious error by Bill and his spymaster boss, and it harmed her reputation as well as the cause. The Brit who pointed out their colossal fuckup got beaten up by Bill, who was defending his own bad judgment in the guise of defending Edie.
I’m sorry Bill got injured, but he then lied to Edie by omission for years. Now she dumps the man and the city she loves in order to go off with Bill out of a sense of duty, who in turn gets to raise another man’s child. No wonder she grew up to become an angry old woman.
OK, this is why you should have jumped his bones ASAP. :smack: Yeah, a week or whatever it was of wild, unprotected sex followed by celibacy with another guy, what could possibly go wrong? All right, maybe he wasn’t that kind of guy or something, whatever. Frankly, she shouldn’t be surprised that he wasn’t all happy-joy about raising a kid that wasn’t his.
So now we stand at - Edie ditches Kiesl out of a sense of duty, neither of them even considered that she might be pretty fertile, she doesn’t manage to hop in bed with Bill before she figures out she’s pregnant/in time to make “gosh, 7 lbs isn’t bad for (amount of time) premature” believable, she spills the beans about everything, he marries her and lets the world think he knocked her up, and he resents her for not waiting long enough for him, for ‘making’ him raise another man’s kid, and for schtupping an ex-enemy (and thinks about those times she was doing “intelligence” in the camp).
Wait, she’s talking to Juliette again - did Juliette call a time out in this whole thing to call Edda and squee over how she’s a “love child”? Kind of a tacky thing to do, especially when your mom is going to drop the whole “and man, did this mess with our marriage” news right after.
What, there couldn’t have been a “Oooh, look at the time, Ma, I gotta go. We’ll pick this up where we left off tomorrow”? C’mon, that critique is a bit of a stretch.
Sure, there could have, but knowing these two and the sheer level of TMI poured out during the course of the tale - it’s not just assumed, we definitely know that Juliette was explicitly (in both senses) told about Edie sucking on Kiesl’s fingers and more - I would not at all be surprised if Juliette said “just a sec, I have to call Edda about this ‘love child’ news!” Plus, Juliette has never been demure on matters of sexuality and other things.
The pacing of the story makes it really hard to tell how much time this whole tale took. Earlier in the story there was at least one break where Juliette obviously left her mom’s bedside and talked to Edda, but now that she’s out of the hospital it’s harder to judge time passing. Before, breaks in the story were sensible as Edna wasn’t well and dozed off at least once, but now she’s out, so there’s less reason to stop, and no cues in the text.
I don’t have a lot of sympathy for Bill. It was his stalling that allowed Edie and Peter time to perfect their horizontal mambo in the first place. If he hadn’t been so stubborn about letting her know he was alive, none of this would have happened.
Yeah. I wonder if he admitted that to himself or not. Maybe he knew it but projected it onto her - if she had been a “good girl” and waited for marriage, she wouldn’t have gotten herself knocked up. That certainly fit the morals of the time. Sounds like a recipe for both of them to have a marriage filled with regrets and resentment.
Oh, I just had a horrible thought. Kiesl’s going to make another appearance at the end of all this. Edda’s going to notice a dapper old man staring at her with astonishment in New York. When she asks him if something’s wrong, he’s just going to say, “I’m sorry; you reminded me of someone I used to know.” Cut to a shot of Gram suddenly in tears, and when Juliette asks her why she’s crying, she’ll say, “I … don’t know.”
On the other hand, would Juliette — and thus Edda — have been as talented as they are had Bill been their biological father? Perhaps; but it’s more probable that Keisl’s and Edie’s genes reinforced each other in that area.
(The above is a semi-desperate attempt to find an upside to the situation.)
(I’m also reminded of an episode of The Tonight Show in which someone from PETA asked Johnny Carson if he didn’t agree that Charlie the Tuna was suicidal. Carson replied that he couldn’t say, but that he thought anyone who spent time psychoanalyzing a fictional fish was a little weird.)
