The Best Contemporary Women's Fiction: Six Novels

by Jenna Blum

  But next year is a long way off, and since Will died, I have been afflicted with that common response to death, carpe diem. Until it happens to you, you have no idea what form it will take, which days you'll want to seize and which you'd rather do without. And of course it's a metaphor; you can't clutch a day the way you can an umbrella, a steering wheel, a book. The saying implores you to seize your pleasure, seize the pleasures of the world while they are still available to you.

  In this spirit, this effort to live in the moment, not the spiral of the past or the maze of the purely speculative, I recently gave up thinking it is essential to have all the answers: How precisely did Will die? How did the dog end up the way he did? And why did I get a telegram from a man Will had known in Manila even before the obituaries were published? I wrote to the man, Arthur Glass, to thank him for his condolences and ask how he had found out before everyone else. I don't expect an answer from him—he's a spy, after all—but when I wrote two months ago, I still felt that if I didn't learn the answer, if it existed somewhere in the world and I could not seize it, know it, pull it from the sky like a helium balloon on a string, I would never have a moment's peace. Some days, speaking of days, it's touch and go, but other days I think I might.

  The day the coroner's report came back, two weeks after the funeral, was not a good day. Cause of Death: Inconclusive. It's funny how that's being the last word doesn't mean you stop thinking about it. It means only that you're one of the few left thinking about it.

  Today, six weeks later, one of the last days of August, is a much better day. First thing after breakfast, Vicki and Cam watered the garden. Tran and Van bicycled up and down the street. We went grocery shopping and to the beach for many hours. When we got home, Daniel phoned, as he has done every day, from London, and the children lined up to speak to him. They all reported that they were still having a good time, after five days here, and three out of four asked why they cant live on Swansea, because there are more things for kids to do here than in New York. Then we had a cookout, as we've had every night since they arrived, with toasted marshmallows on sticks for dessert. Putting them to sleep after so much sunshine is a cinch; they long for the bed, they collapse onto it like actors doing pratfalls. Boom, down, and they're out.

  Tonight moths hurl themselves against the screens. Maple leaves and oak and sycamore on long branches sway and rustle like distant waves crashing against the shore. The night is thick and lovely, the children are asleep upstairs, the wind is warm, and I am at the kitchen table with the early pages of the story I have just told you, when I hear a soft skittering noise. A squirrel on the roof? I go back to my pages, so when I hear Vicki's voice across the room, at the foot of the stairs, I start. Her eyes are the color of ebony and as bright as a cat's. "I had a bad dream" is all she says.

  When I open my arms, she comes to me. Her hair smells of baby shampoo and her skin faintly of salt, of long days in ocean water. She's wearing Lion King theme pajamas, the summer model, with all the beasts of the jungle emblazoned on her narrow chest. "What happened in your dream?" She folds herself onto my lap, and to me, her bad dream, her needing me, the feel of her hair against my cheek, the pulse of her heartbeat against my palm, are bliss.

  "When I got to my house, there was no one there. And everything was gone. I opened the front door, and there were no rooms, no floors, no ceiling, only air and the sky on top of it."

  "Where was everyone?"

  "I think they were in Haiti with Toinette."

  In real life, Toinette, their housekeeper-nanny, is in Haiti; that's why the children are with me in Will's house. Daniel had a business trip to London planned for some time when Toinette's mother died suddenly and she had to go back to the island. There aren't many people you can ask to take care of your four young children for five days. You are desperate. You ask your former lover. You ask me, the woman one of your kids pretended to run away to. I did not hesitate for an instant before I said yes. He made me an offer I couldn't refuse, and I made him one: the children could spend the last week of August on Swansea. Tomorrow morning he'll fly into Boston from London and take an Island Air flight here to pick them up.

  It has been two months since Will was found dead. Two days after the funeral, I returned briefly to New York to collect some belongings, pay my bills, and tell Daniel I could not keep doing what we had done before. I was surprised at his surprise. "But you always seemed to enjoy yourself," he said.

  "It was starting to feel a little thin."

  "How so?"

  "Watery."

  His brow furrowed in puzzlement.

  "Lacking nourishment."

  "I'm not sure I understand what you're getting at."

  "I want to be with someone who loves me."

  "I didn't imagine that would be important so soon after your separation. I assumed you'd want to sow a few wild oats. I never could understand why you chose someone in my position."

  Sitting now with Vicki on my lap, I shudder to think of how oblivious he was; how thoroughly he had misread me; and how thin his feelings for me had been. I shudder on my behalf and also on his children's. When they tell him they have bad dreams, does he have any idea what they mean? Does he know they have meaning? Is he aware that they matter?

  I say to Vicki, "Would you like to be in Haiti with Toinette?" She shakes her head against my neck. "How about London with your dad?"

  "Maybe a little."

  "Vietnam?"

  She takes a long time to answer and sounds grown-up when she does. "I'll wait until I'm older."

  "Will you be sad to leave Swansea tomorrow?"

  There is a distinct nod, different from a shake of the head, against my shoulder, but no words.

  "Everyone is sad when they have to leave here," I say. "People write books about Swansea, because it's so beautiful."

  "Is that what your book is about?"

  "That's some of it."

  "Will it have pictures?"

  "It's not that kind of book."

  "What kind of book is it?"

  Her head leans tenderly on my shoulder. We are speaking softly, like lovers; my arms encircle her arms, like lovers'; and I am uncertain about how to explain it to a child, even this child, who knows so much, who has lost two mothers, a father in Vietnam, God knows how many biological siblings, her country, her language, the date and year of her birth, her entire history. When I don't answer right away, she slings another question at me: "Just tell me this: is it going to have a happy ending?"

  The predictable ending I've been considering is Will's funeral. So, no, not particularly happy. But as funerals go, Will's was dull, much duller than the man himself, presided over by a doddering, pious Boston Irishman. I don't mean to sound flippant, but it did have the flavor of a parody, of the wrong man's funeral. The coffin—I call it Clare's coffin, since she picked it out and paid five thousand dollars for it—was a piece of Mafia-rococo furniture, a bronze finish with silver buckles and miniature marble caryatids in which I knew Will would not want to spend eternity. But there he was on the catafalque, in Clare's Cadillac, about to be buried next to his son in an old island cemetery. I sat between Henderson and our neighbor Ben in the second row, behind my stepdaughters and their mother, and cried quietly, except when the priest was actually talking about Will, because everything he said had an "as told to" quality. It didn't feel like Will distilled; it felt like Will watered down, a dim Xerox of the man. He was hardly there.

  When it was my turn, I read two poems, the Emily Dickinson that begins, That it will never come again/is what makes life so sweet, and Henderson's gift of Paul Muldoon's "The Birth," about his daughter's first moments in the world. When I spoke for a few minutes after I read, about Will's love of Swansea, about our meeting on Honeysuckle Road, about how game he always was, I found myself looking over the audience for Crystal and was disappointed not to see her, although there was no reason to expect I would. Our encounter the day before had brought something to a close for me, and I entertaine
d a brief fantasy that it had for her, too. But for her, it was probably more bad news about her own life: no relief, no illumination. She had caused someone in bad shape a lot of pain; that's all. Chances are she was trying to forget about it. I didn't have that luxury. What I had was that haunting line from Will's diary, which I had shared only with Henderson, and I went back and forth on how to interpret it, like someone pulling the petals of a daisy. He loves me, he loves me not. I saved him, I let him go, I saved him, I killed him, I loved him, I should have loved him longer, I left him, I shouldn't have, if I hadn't he'd be alive, but then again he might not be. Cause of Death: Inconclusive. The answer is that there will be no answer, ever. My love may be what kept him alive ten years ago, but would my devotion have done as much for the next ten years? Crystal had no reason to come to his funeral, but in front of me were forty or forty-five people who had cared about him. They were here because of his decency, good humor, and adventurousness. The sadness and fragility were not what he showed the world.

  "Well," Vicki says again, this time more sharply, "will it or won't it have a happy ending?"

  In lieu of the funeral, I've considered ending the book with my phone call to the Eighth Deadly when I returned to New York for those few days after the funeral. I told him I wouldn't write the autobiography of Bill and Melinda Gates's nanny. I told him it was time for me to quit being a ghost writer, and told myself I had to quit being second-in-command, the interpreter and inheritor of other people's lives, the second wife, the stepmother, the mimic. I had to tell my own story, not everyone else's. I wanted to dwell in my own ragged, insolvent, unkempt life, and I wanted to seize all the days I could.

  That is too complicated to explain to a child, even one as precocious as Vicki, but I start in anyway. I stop talking halfway through the first sentence, when I see I am being as oblivious of her needs as Daniel was of mine. She had a bad dream, and all she wants to know—all any of us want to know—is that there will be a happy ending, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

  "Of course there will be," I tell her. "No question about it."

  And who's to say that the two of us, entwined on a wooden armchair in this house that used to be mine on this beautiful late summer night, this child who has lost as much as she has, and I—you know my story—who's to say that this is not it?

  Elizabeth Benedict is the author of Slow Dancing, a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Fiction Prize; The Beginner's Book of Dreams; Safe Conduct; and The Joy of Writing Sex. Her work has appeared in Salmagundi, the New York Times, Esquire, Harper's Bazaar, the American Prospect, Tin House, and other periodicals. She has taught writing at Princeton University, Swarthmore College, and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. She now lives in New York City and Somerville, Massachusetts.

  Also by

  Elizabeth Benedict

  The Practice of Deceit

  A NOVEL

  The Practice of Deceit is a razor-sharp

  psychological thriller about a nice guy who

  runs afoul of a ruthless divorce lawyer—who

  happens to be his wife. As she did in her best-

  seller Almost, Benedict navigates the turbu-

  lent waters of love, law, and ethics with

  wit and penetrating insight.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-618-71051-5

  ISBN-10: 0-618-71051-5

  Look for the Reader's Guide at

  www.marinerreadersguides.com.

  AVAILABLE FROM MARINER BOOKS

  THOSE WHO SAVE US

  Jenna Blum

  HARCOURT, INC.

  Orlando Austin New York San Diego Toronto London

  Copyright © 2004 by Jenna Blum

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced

  or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,

  including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval

  system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be mailed to the following address: Permissions Department, Harcourt, Inc.,

  6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.

  www.HarcourtBooks.com

  Excerpts from this book have been previously published in slightly different form in the Briar Cliff Review, Meridian, and Prairie Schooner.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Blum, Jenna.

  Those who save us/Jenna Blum.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-15-101019-6

  1. World War, 1939–1945—Underground movements—Fiction. 2. World War, 1939–1945—Germany—Fiction. 3. Germany—History—1933–1945—Fiction. 4. Holocaust, Jewish (1939…1945)—Fiction. 5. German American women—Fiction. 6. Young women—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3602.L863T47 2004

  813'.54—dc22 2003014777

  Text set in Garamond MT

  Designed by Cathy Riggs

  Printed in the United States of America

  First edition

  A C E G I K J H F D B

  This book is for my mother, Frances Joerg Blum, who took me to Germany and gave me the key:

  Ich liebe Dich, meine Mutti.

  And it is in beloved memory of my dad, Robert P. Blum, who would have said Mazel tov.

  I had voluntarily joined the ranks of the active SS and I had become

  too fond of the black uniform to relinquish it in this way.

  —RUDOLF HOESS, COMMANDANT OF AUSCHWITZ

  Prologue: Trudy and Anna, 1993

  THE FUNERAL IS WELL ATTENDED, THE NEW HEIDELBURG LUTHERAN CHURCH packed to capacity with farmers and their families who have come to bid farewell to one of their own. Since every seat is full, they also line the walls and crowd the vestibule. The men are comically unfamiliar in dark suits; they don't get this dressed up for regular services. The women, however, wear what they do every Sunday no matter what the weather, skirt-and-sweater sets with hose and pumps. Their parkas, which are puffy and incongruous and signify the imminent return to life's practicalities, are their sole concession to the cold.

  And it is cold. December in Minnesota is a bad time to have to bury a loved one, Trudy Swenson thinks. In fact, it is quite impossible. The topsoil is frozen three feet down, and her father will have to be housed in a refrigeration unit in the county morgue until the earth thaws enough to receive him. Trudy tries to steer her mind away from how Jack will look after several months in storage. She makes an attempt to instead concentrate on the eulogy. But she must be suffering the disjointed cognition of the bereaved, for her thoughts have assumed a willful life of their own. They circle above her in the nave, presenting her with an aerial view of the church and its inhabitants: Trudy herself sitting very upright in the front row next to her mother, Anna; the minister droning on about a man who, from his description, could be any fellow here; the deceased looking dead in his casket; the rest of the town seated behind Trudy, staring at the back of her head. Trudy feels horribly conspicuous, and although she means her father no disrespect, she prays only for the service to be over.

  Then it is, and the congregation rumbles to its feet and stands in expectation. Trudy realizes that they are waiting for her and Anna to depart the church ahead of everyone else, as is proper. She pauses to mumble a final good-bye to Jack; then she takes Anna's elbow to help her from the pew. Anna allows Trudy to guide her past the ranks of impassive faces, but once they are outside she folds her arms to her sides and forges on alone. The two women take tiny cautious steps over the ice to Trudy's car.

  Trudy starts the ignition and sits shivering, waiting for the engine to warm up. The interior of the Civic won't be comfortable until they have reached their destination, the farmhouse six miles north of here. The arctic air is like shards of glass in the lungs; it shakes Trudy to the bones until they threaten to snap.

  Well, I thought that was a nice service, she says to Anna. />
  Anna is looking through the passenger's window at the horizon. The Lutheran Church is built on the highest ridge in New Heidelburg, all the better to be close to God. From this vantage point in the summer, the countryside below is a dreaming checkerboard over which it seems that one could, with a running start, spread one's arms and fly. Now it is a sullen and unbroken white.

  Trudy tries again.

  Short and simple, she says. Dad would have approved, don't you think?

  Slowly, Anna turns her pale gaze on the windshield and then upon her daughter, staring at Trudy as though she doesn't know who Trudy is.

  We must get to the house, she replies. I must set out the food. The people will be coming soon enough.

  This is true; all around them, the New Heidelburgers are already climbing into their trucks and minivans. After a brief and respectful intermission to let the family members refresh their public faces, the townsfolk will descend upon the farmhouse, bearing casseroles and condolences. Trudy shifts into gear and accelerates out of the lot, noting Anna's hands and feet jerk up, just a little, at the unaccustomed speed. Although Anna has lived nearly fifty years in this remote rural area, where people think nothing of traveling half an hour to buy groceries, she has never learned to drive. She turns back to her window to watch the fields as they blur past.

  To Trudy, who abandoned New Heidelburg for the Twin Cities as soon as she finished high school thirty-five years earlier, this landscape is a study in monotony, as bleak and inhospitable as the steppes of Siberia. Snow and mud, gray sky, line after line of barbed-wire fencing swooping along the two-lane road. Silos and trailers. Even the cows are nowhere to be seen. It is early yet, three o'clock, but night comes quickly in this part of the country; it will be full dark in an hour. The knowledge of this, and how she will spend that time, makes Trudy feel desperate to be in her own kitchen, her study, in her classroom lecturing disenchanted students, anywhere but here. She suddenly decides she will return to Minneapolis sooner than planned, perhaps tomorrow morning. For one of the odd things about death, Trudy has discovered, is that in its wake one must go about business as usual; it seems heartless and wrong, but now that the rituals of mourning have been attended to, the sole task left to Trudy is to try and comprehend the enormity of this sudden change. And this she might as well do in the comfort of her home rather than sitting in silence with Anna.