by Ursula Hegi
“Which I will provide for her.” The moment Stefan said it, he could see his wife’s broken fingernails and felt ashamed. Felt a sudden rage at the banker for knowing about the broken fingernails and his shame.
“Let me explain something to you. Money I give to the church has nothing to do with the church.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It has everything to do with what my wife needs. Lelia enjoys visiting with the priest—investigating her soul, Father Albin calls it—and he is generous with his time when it comes to the wealthy wives of this town.”
The back of Stefan’s neck felt itchy, his starched collar too tight. There was too much of everything in the banker’s office, the banker’s house. It all only emphasized the gap between Elizabeth and himself.
“With a loan from me, you can provide what my daughter needs much sooner than you can on your own. I want you to think about my offer. Both your names on the deeds—for the house and the restaurant. With right of survivorship.”
To get away, Stefan promised, “I will think about it. A very generous offer,” he added on his way to the door.
But when he told Elizabeth, she misunderstood and assumed he had already accepted. She was so delighted that he felt miserable telling her about his misgivings.
“Misgivings?” She stared at him. “About what?”
“About borrowing money from your father.”
“But he offered.”
“I know. And it makes me feel selfish, expecting you to live above the restaurant. Especially now that you’ll have a child.”
“It should make you feel selfish … damn selfish.”
“I feel pushed. By you and your father.”
“You are.”
“I think of you wallpapering by yourself and—”
“I wasn’t pregnant then.” She grasped him by the arms. “Can’t we just celebrate? The loan and the baby?”
When he finally agreed, she bought him a present, a green rowboat. He found reasons not to use it: he was too busy; he was tired; the weather was not right. But by summer—the only summer the two of them would have together—she was taking him for moonlight outings on the lake. She’d line the bottom of the boat with pillows and bring a thermos filled with hot chocolate. As he’d point out the pattern of stars for her, they’d sit with their backs against one side of the boat, feet dangling across the other side.
Now that an architect was drawing up blueprints of the building with its thirty-six apartments, Stefan was glad he didn’t have to wait any longer, and it gave him pleasure to listen to his wife plan their own apartment on the sixth floor. The largest in the house, it was to take up one entire side of the U-shaped structure, with the living room and kitchen facing the lake. Elizabeth knew exactly what she was going to buy and described everything to him in vivid detail as if she were already living in those rooms with velvet sofas and chairs, white china with a border of golden leaves, painted wicker baskets with asparagus ferns. But while the windows in her parents’ house were covered with lace curtains and brocade drapes, she planned to keep hers bare, their only backdrop the sky and mountains.
Those nights on the lake had a timelessness about them, infusing Stefan with a feeling of being totally at home, more certain than ever that he’d been meant to leave Burgdorf and come to this very place, and when he would remember those nights as an old man, they would seem to fill years of his life.
By November, when the workmen had erected the massive foundation, Elizabeth lay in a hard-breathing labor that took hold of her for forty-one hours and seized her life as her child pushed through her flesh. While the midwife, Mrs. West, pried the infant’s head and shoulders from its cooling grave, Stefan shook Elizabeth’s arm and cried out her name as though he believed he could jolt her back into life.
“Like a crazy man,” the midwife told Mr. Heflin when she bought salt and molasses from him the day before Elizabeth’s burial. “Stefan Blau shoved me from the room as soon as his wife was dead. Told me to never come back.”
“Like a crazy man,” Mr. Heflin told his sister-in-law who, in turn, repeated those words to others who climbed the path to the cemetery where Stefan stood with the infant pressed against his chest, though several of the women would have liked to relieve him of that burden.
The cemetery lay right at the edge of town on a plateau from where you could see most of the houses and, beyond them, the lake and white-capped mountains. A path with deep ruts—the outer ones from carriage wheels, the center rut from hooves—stopped about five hundred feet from the cemetery. There, you would leave your carriages and carry the coffins the final stretch, which was so steep that the old people of Winnipesaukee quite often didn’t make it up here for funerals of their family and friends. It was said that once you were very old, the one way to get up to the cemetery was if you were to die and get carried.
Between and around the graves, a lot of the pines and birches had been cleared, and those that were left had moss hanging from their lower branches as if they were weeping. From a distance, these long, greenish strands looked airy and soft and swayed with the slightest wind; but if you happened to walk into one, it would feel coarse against your face, and you’d notice bits of bark woven into the moss along with specks of dust that looked like fleas.
Since winters were so cold that you couldn’t bury the bodies deeply enough in the frozen ground, all of the graves had stones piled on them to prevent animals from digging. Come spring, white flowers would sprout from between those stones, but at Elizabeth Blau’s funeral the only flowers were wooden tulips, three yellow and three red, that stuck in the mound of stones on the Heflins’ family plot. These stones had partly sunk into the earth, the smaller ones in the middle and the larger ones around the outside.
As Elizabeth’s mother stepped up against the edge of the cemetery, her heart went still because all she heard was the noise of the brook that came off the mountain behind the cemetery at a steep angle and tumbled in swirls of white toward the lake. She knew if she were to take a single step on the other path behind that plateau that brought you down to the brook, her skin would feel cooler as a hush of cold blossomed around her, drawing her downward toward its source. But she knew not to go there. Not now. And not for at least a year. People in town called it Brook-that-finishes-grieving because mourners had thrown themselves into its white fall after the loss of someone they had loved. They fretted especially about their children who were old enough but not wise enough to love, and who climbed down to hidden pockets of forest along the brook to do their loving in secrecy. It was a hazardous path. A path that some—who now lay beneath the earth—had returned to after their love had ended.
Elizabeth’s mother turned back to the grave of her daughter and circled her son-in-law’s wrist with her thin fingers. “Promise you won’t go near that brook,” she said.
The townspeople would look upon him with mercy, this foreigner who had become a widower after not even a full year of marriage, and they would pray for him and for Elizabeth’s parents who had brought up their one child with the best of everything they could give her, only to lose her twice—first to marriage and now to death—the interval between those two passages so fleeting that they would fuse into one for the townspeople in the decades when the newborn girl would grow into a woman far older than her mother had ever been.
Elizabeth’s parents, who expected Stefan to turn from the child in his pain, offered to raise her in their house, but he thanked them and promised to bring their granddaughter for a visit every Sunday. When she was christened the week after her mother’s burial, he deliberated on names that were common in America and Germany, and he chose his sister’s name, Margret, but called his daughter Greta. Clearly, she was not the child he had envisioned dancing around the fountain. She was of delicate build like her mother, and her downy hair was the color of the stubble on his arms as though she had sprung from fire.
He hired a nurse for Greta, but in the late evenings he’d rock he
r on his knees, stunned by the absence of his wife’s current of words. It made him mute, that longing for her voice, and he found it unbearable to speak to his daughter in her mother’s language. But it eased him to talk to Greta in his native language that he’d rarely spoken in years, cradling her in one arm while she sucked on her bottle, her clear eyes on his face as if she could understand every word.
“Fröschken,” he called her. Little frog.
And he pointed to himself. “Vati,” he said. Daddy.
When she was teething, he rubbed her gums with whiskey, and when that didn’t help, he climbed into the icehouse, where he scraped the sawdust from the top layer of ice, carried a large chunk with tongs to his kitchen, and chipped off long splinters for Greta to suck on. That summer she learned to swim before she could walk. With the lake right there, Stefan believed in preparing her for water so that it would never become a danger to her. As a boy, he’d swum in the Rhein with his father, and he took Greta into the water, one hand beneath her, the other holding her head above the shallow waves, keeping her safe the way his father had kept him safe, the way he would teach each of his children and grandchildren to swim.
After the year of mourning had passed, he began his careful search for a suitable mother for Greta. He noticed Sara Penn who worked behind the counter of her family’s bakery. The firstborn of eight children, Sara had looked after her sisters and brothers since she’d been tall enough to fry an egg without burning herself. She had what the people in Stefan’s hometown would have called Schlafzimmeraugen—bedroom eyes—with smooth, long eyelids that seemed always half closed. Although five years younger than Elizabeth, she seemed more like a woman while Elizabeth had remained a girl.
The summer of 1908 he began to invite her for walks with him and Greta, who’d toddle between them, gripping one of their fingers in each pudgy hand and linking them in that manner, breathing in the smells that identified them for her: tobacco and melted butter for her father; warm bread and rose water for Sara who wore dresses in shades of blue, ranging from indigo to pale blue, who had a long, easy stride and a dark braid that swung across one shoulder, who would hoist Greta on her hip as though she belonged there and carry her without effort, singing in her low voice.
Sara had firm hands that touched Stefan’s temples if his head ached and held on to his broad shoulders when he bent above her in his struggle to erase the features of Elizabeth which, too often, superimposed themselves upon Sara’s face.
Sara’s favorite possession was a lined notebook she’d filled as a schoolgirl with legends she’d heard, and Greta loved hearing about the first white settlers and the Winnipesaukee Indians, especially the one about the Indian princess, Ellacoya. As she’d listen to Sara’s words, pictures would shape inside her mind, pictures of Kona, the young chieftain who crossed the lake to court Ellacoya, pictures of Ellacoya’s father, the warrior Ahanton who said no to anyone who wanted to marry his daughter. Greta saw him attack Kona, saw the princess step between them. After the wedding Kona returned across the lake with his bride, and a storm nearly overturned the canoes. But all at once sun split the clouds, showing the way to safety. Ahanton called this the Smile of the Great Spirit—Winnipesaukee.
“That’s how our lake got its name,” Sara told Greta.
A gatherer by nature, she took Stefan and Greta to a slope on Belknap Mountain where blueberries grew in rich and deep-blue patches and showed them how, from up here, you could see the entire town the way it lay around the curved shoreline of the lake like the arm of a woman, hugging it closely. Its houses—some brick, but most white or gray clapboard—clustered around the three churches: Congregationalist, Baptist, and Catholic.
One afternoon, while Sara and Stefan made love, rain pelted his bedroom window, and after the rain stopped, they woke Greta from her nap and took her for a walk. At the edge of the schoolyard, they came across Elizabeth’s mother, breaking a white rose from one of the bushes that she and her husband had planted here where their daughter had gone to school—one bush for each year of her life. Though Father Albin—whose guidance Lelia Flynn sought out far too often, the townspeople said—had cautioned the Flynns that roses did not always survive the harsh New Hampshire winters, they’d still planted them because Elizabeth used to love white roses; and they had done so without the help of their gardener or even the principal who had offered to assist them when he’d seen them out there in their expensive clothes, wielding shovels, awkward and determined. Despite the priest’s warning, the tender shrubs had already made it through their first winter and were thriving, forming what was to become a lush hedge between the playground and the lumberyard across the street.
When Mrs. Flynn noticed Sara with Stefan, she stood with the stem in her fingers as if she’d been caught taking something that didn’t belong to her. “Stefan,” she said. “Stefan?” Her eyelashes fluttered for an instant. “Greta.”
The air was still so moist that Sara felt it wet against her face, her neck, between her thighs that still held the memory of Stefan’s body. And what had felt right when she’d lain with him, felt like sin now that she was standing in front of his dead wife’s mother. “Let me wrap your flower,” she offered and unfolded her handkerchief, dipped it into a shallow puddle. “It’ll be fresh when you get it home.”
Lelia Flynn glanced at Stefan, then at Greta who clutched a blue fold of Sara’s skirt.
“It’s clean, the handkerchief,” Sara said.
“Oh—it’s not that.” Lelia Flynn extended her rose.
When Stefan tried to introduce the two women to each other, Sara said quietly, “Mrs. Flynn knows me from the bakery.” Carefully she wound her wet handkerchief around the stem.
“Thank you. I will have this washed so I can give it back to you next Sunday.”
“Sunday?”
“When my son-in-law brings you to my house.”
Sara frowned.
“I did not intend to imply that you should feel honored to be—” Lelia Flynn sounded flustered.
Stefan watched Sara, impressed that she was not impressed at being invited by the banker’s wife.
Lelia shook her head. “What I wanted to say was that I would be honored if you came to my house. Father Albin will be there too.”
From then on Sara was invited along every Sunday and sat at the table that Lelia would decorate with settings of varied height, three-tiered silver trays with petit fours, glass bowls spilling grapes and plums and bananas, strawberries scattered in deliberate disorder on the tablecloth between the candlesticks and bud vases. By the time Sara married Stefan—almost exactly two years after Elizabeth’s death—Lelia had grown so fond of her that she gave her an exquisite set of Italian silver trays. At the reception that was held at Stefan’s restaurant, Sara propped Greta on the table next to the wedding cake and fed her icing right from her thumb.
While working in the restaurant kitchen, Sara often balanced the child on one hip while she measured ingredients. Though Stefan still arranged the final garnishes on his pastries, she prepared the crusts and fillings. He was careful not to mention his first wife in front of Sara, but he was constantly reminded of Elizabeth because her features were growing more pronounced in his daughter, whose gray eyes would settle themselves upon others, absorbing, memorizing. Most people felt uncomfortable and glanced away, but Sara laughed and swung Greta around in her arms, telling her not to be so serious, unaware that the child was aching with the knowledge of Sara’s death.
She gave Greta crayons and sheets of butcher paper and hung up the stick figures the child drew for her. Two weeks before Sara became pregnant, Greta’s drawings took on pear-like curves that softened the silhouettes of her stick figures and contained another, smaller shape curled within the curve. Sometimes there’d be two shapes, not touching, one far tinier than the other as though it needed time to bring it to fruition.
When Sara hadn’t bled for two entire months, she took Greta to her parents’ bakery and left her with one of her sisters,
while she walked along the lake by herself, the collar of her coat turned up. The water was choppy, and crests of foam bobbed above its lead-colored surface. The only boat out was the mail boat, its long, knotted ropes hanging from its hull. Wind snatched at the white haze that rose from the smokestack, and the sun bounced off the windows of the pilot house, brief flashes of light, as if a child were playing with a pocket mirror. There’d always been children to care for in her life … her siblings, and now Greta. Children she loved. But she couldn’t imagine herself with a child of her own.
She returned for a walk the following day and the days after that, returned till she was used to the idea of herself being a mother. And only then did she tell Stefan.
He stood in front of her like an awkward boy. “Are you happy then, are you?” Pressing her hands between his, he asked, “Are you?”
He took his best suit from the hanger and told her he’d be back soon; but instead of stopping at the construction site to supervise, he headed for the Catholic church, careful to avoid the deep mud. While the lower regions of the mountains had been turning green, their summits were still capped with snow, and spring thaw had left the roads of the town so spongy that carriages and delivery wagons had been getting stuck all week. Pete Morrell and some of the other farmers were earning extra money by keeping their teams of oxen ready for towing.
As Stefan approached the churchyard, a flock of swallows rose from a puddle, forming a cone that spun upward and was sucked into the mild, damp wind. On the church steps, he scraped the wet earth from his shoes before he entered. The oxblood-colored curtain of the confessional enveloped him like an embrace of shame, and after Father Albin’s raspy voice absolved him from years of sins—pride and greed among them—Stefan knelt by the side altar, where the statue of the Virgin cradled the waxen corpse of Christ. There, as he remembered the banker’s words—money I give to the church has nothing to do with the church—he proposed his own deal to God: he would attend church every Sunday, sing in the choir, and contribute ten percent of his income if Sara and the child survived.