by Ursula Hegi
“Of course,” she said slowly, feeling drained by her worries about those children.
“Don’t feel foolish. Everyone who comes here from another country has stories like that. Of not understanding. Hey…” He covered her hand with his. “It’s funny.”
But it was only when Greta said, “Fun-ny … fun-ny …,” slapping the back of her spoon into her mashed potatoes with each syllable, that Helene could join in the laughter.
After that, laughter seemed to happen easier between her and Stefan. When Stefan gave a reception in the lobby of the Wasserburg to introduce her to his tenants, Nate Bloom arrived with four bottles of champagne and a young woman whose hat was decorated with silk peonies and the feathers of songbirds. “This here’s Eileen,” he said. “My girlfriend.”
Stefan led them to the buffet table where two of his waiters were serving the food he’d prepared in his restaurant. Beeswax candles and tall vases with gladiolas were set up on either end of the long table.
Eileen’s left hand shot out toward a tray with hors d’oeuvres, but instantly she pulled her thin fingers back as if against their will. “Do any of these have shrimps in them?”
“I do not know,” Helene said.
Eileen frowned at her. “Huh?”
“My wife said she does not know,” Stefan said, “but I can assure you that I didn’t use any shrimps today.”
Still, she hesitated. “But have there been shrimps on any of these serving plates before?”
For an instant he observed her without speaking, but then he said in his most polite voice, the one reserved for difficult guests, “I’m in the habit of using clean plates.”
“I didn’t question your habits.”
“Honey…” Nate circled one arm around her shoulders. “Honey, why don’t we just have a glass of champagne for now? We both know that agrees with you.”
“Please. I’m trying to tell you that I even get a reaction if I eat from a plate that had shrimps on it hours before.”
“What exactly happens?” Stefan encouraged her.
“My breathing passages close up. And I get hives all over.”
“Is that so?”
“And I have been known to collapse.”
“You mean you can’t speak at all when that happens?” He managed to sound concerned.
But Helene could tell he was close to laughing. And so was she. Bringing her lips close to his ear, she whispered in German, “Let’s feed her some shrimps then, quickly.”
When Mr. Bell, the retired lawyer, started playing his violin, Nate led his girlfriend toward the double door in back of the lobby. “Let me show you the lake, honey.”
As the party spilled out toward the dock, a few of the children got their swimsuits and ran into the water.
Mr. and Mrs. Evans from the fourth floor pulled Helene aside. “We brought you American pralines,” Mr. Evans said and handed her a red velvet box much prettier than any box she’d seen in Germany.
But when she passed them around and tasted one herself, it was too sweet for her, too soft. Still, she managed to thank them without lying. “My first American pralines,” she said in her halting English.
“I am so glad you like them.” Mrs. Evans was leaning on a cane though she was barely forty.
“Some of the other girls from the building will join us in a while,” her husband told Helene.
She was amazed when those girls turned out to be women older than she. One of them had a tiny face with fine, silky creases so stretched that her eyes protruded. That tautness was there in her movements too, as if her entire body had been compressed.
“Welcome to our building,” she said as if she were one of its owners and presented Helene with a red cake tin that was filled with peanut brittle. “I’m Miss Garland, and I made this for you. For this occasion.”
“Thank you,” Helene said, trying to touch the back of her teeth with her tongue so that it wouldn’t sound like zank you.
“You may keep the container.”
“Thank you.”
“Those wasps again,” Mr. Evans said and swatted at the air.
“I’ve always been fond of Germany,” Miss Garland said. “My fiancé traveled widely in Germany as a boy, and he said he’d like to take me there on our honeymoon.”
Helene saw Miss Garland arm in arm with a dapper, old man, standing by the railing of an excursion boat… eating dinner at a linen-covered table on the terrace of the Kaisershafen Gasthaus high above the Rhein, where he pours Mosel wine into her glass, leans toward her voice. … How splendid, Helene thought, that here in America people can marry so late in life. It made her feel like a young bride. Through the open door, sun and the voices of children streamed into the lobby, and far out on the lake the striped sails of a boat filled up with light.
“I hope you will like it in Germany,” Helene told Miss Garland.
“Oh, but you don’t understand … The wedding, it was all set, but—”
“He departed,” Mr. Evans said.
“Died,” his wife corrected him. “Buried. Gone.”
Stunned by the lack of compassion, Helene turned to Miss Garland. “I am very very sorry. And that it should happen now.”
Miss Garland blinked. “Now?”
“When you go to your … how do you say? … weddingmoon.”
“Honeymoon. Except that my fiancé died forty-four years ago.”
“But—”
“He died young, and he died tragically. A riding accident. Some people—” She frowned at Mr. and Mrs. Evans. “—may think it foolish that there’s not a day I don’t think about him.”
“Oh, but it is not foolish,” Helene said fervently, wishing she could express herself better.
Miss Garland felt a satisfying moment of connection to the new Mrs. Blau because she could tell that Helene, too, had experienced the longing that was so familiar to her. “Tell me about him,” she said.
“It is not like that,” Helene said quickly. She didn’t want to let Miss Garland or any of the other tenants see how confusing it felt to be the third wife of a man who still carried his other wives with him. For Stefan, she would have liked to be flamboyant and glamorous, the type of woman who’d capture his passion and make it equal to her own, who’d make him forget any other woman. Lying next to him at night, she’d curse her pride that made it unthinkable to reach for him first, to stroke his hairy chest and thighs and back and tell him of the love she had carried for him all those years. Marriage, she had believed, would make it possible to express that love. But Stefan never spoke of love. He’d signal what he wanted by laying one palm on her belly but then—determined to not lose her in childbirth—would separate himself from her all too soon, condemning her with that lightness, that absence of flesh that left her only with the weight of her love.
But at least I’m capable of that kind of love. It was a magnificent love, she knew, a stubborn love; and she would try to ease her pain by imagining herself decades away, an old woman who’d feel compassion for the husband who had shunned a love like that without understanding what he had forgone.
Many nights after he had escaped from her into sleep, leaving her with a loneliness greater than any she had known while lying alone in her bed in Burgdorf, she would slip from beneath the covers, fill the deep tub in the marble bathroom, and let the warm water surround her, permeate her the way her husband would not. Stretched to her full length, the back of her head resting against a folded towel, she’d read German novels that her eyes could follow without the barrier of translation. Sometimes, though, she’d simply lie there, tears blurring the outlines of the hexagonal tiles, and as the water around her cooled, she’d flip up the hot faucet with her toes, astonished by the luxury of it all. In Germany she used to stoke the tall stove next to the tub and wait for it to heat; but in her husband’s house, she could take a bath any hour of the day. Or night. And he won’t even notice I’m gone. As she’d step out of the tub, the amber lamp in the ceiling would cast her into a sooth
ing halo, and in the mirror above the porcelain sink her face would look like that of a woman accustomed to being caressed. The irony of it.
Tell me about him, Miss Garland wanted to ask again; but she postponed her curiosity, filed it away for later. “I believe my fiancé must have known he wouldn’t be here for long. You see—” Her voice receded.
When Helene leaned forward to hear better, she saw tears in Miss Garland’s eyes.
“He wrote me into his will the morning of the accident. Just hours before he—”
“Do not make yourself sad by telling.”
“He wanted me to have a certain life.”
“He was a … how do you say? … considerate man.”
“Most considerate.”
“Dear? Dear, I believe you have other guests,” Mrs. Evans reminded Helene.
“And he was very well to do.” Miss Garland glared at Mrs. Evans. “Poor white trash,” she whispered to Helene, “from Maine. Grew up in a one-room shack and figured she’d marry the most ambitious man she could find. You come to me if you ever have questions about the other tenants. Or about the building.”
Late that evening, after their guests had left, Helene and Stefan walked to the end of the dock, untied their shoes, and let the black water slap against their bare feet. They were laughing as they outdid each other with ideas for shrimp recipes they could feed Nate Bloom’s girlfriend.
“Shrimp Louis.”
“Shrimp salad.”
“Shrimp bisque.” He leaned against her, and when she shifted, he surprised her by resting his head on her lap, right out in the open where anyone who walked along the lake could see them.
“We’ll sauté shrimps for her in butter.”
“We’ll have to do it fast, though. Because Nate’s ladies never last.”
“What’s Miss Garland’s first name?”
“I don’t know. Maybe nobody knows.”
“She must have signed her lease with her full name.”
“All she wrote is ‘Miss Garland.’”
“She told me about her fiancé.”
“If there was a fiancé …”
“But it sounded so true.”
“It probably feels true to her.”
“I believed her.”
“People here say there’s never been anyone for her, that she’s worked all her life at the shoe factory.”
“She made all this up?”
“I haven’t lived here long enough to know for sure. But it’s what they say about her. She likes to pretend the Wasserburg is hers.”
“There’s no harm in letting her pretend … nothing she can take away from you.”
On his chest, he felt the hand of this third wife whose strong fingers he’d seen pluck wilted blossoms from their stems, smooth the earth around plants, brush the hair of another wife’s child from a fevered forehead. “Lenchen?”
“Ja”.
He covered her hand with his and thought he felt his heart beat through both their hands, through sinews and bones and flesh. Ever since she’d arrived here, he’d had more memories of Burgdorf … memories of a forgotten side of himself. Coming to America had been so abrupt, and he’d wanted so much to fit in that he’d shed everything German. Now he was surprised how much of it was still there for him. Because of her.
“Thank you, Lenchen.”
“Warum—why?” She gazed out over the lake. Moon had spilled itself across its black depth, and as the wind mottled the sheen, it looked as if a river of silver were flowing toward her.
“For coming here,” he said.
In the dark she nodded.
“For marrying me,” he said.
With her free hand she reached down into the moon and cooled her throat, her forehead.
1911–1914
When Helene noticed that Greta was squinting a lot, she took her to Dr. Miles who prescribed glasses for her. The morning the optician fitted the glasses on Greta, shapes and colors hurled themselves at her from a world that had been blurry till now. It was a transformation that stunned her and filled her with reverence. Even just on the walk home with her stepmother, she saw the foam riding on the crests of waves where before there had just been gray and white, saw two chipmunks chasing along a fallen log that was covered with moss and dried leaves.
“We need to get home,” her stepmother said.
But Greta squatted to pick up a black feather. The feather had one tiny speck of red, one speck so tiny and yet so brilliant that Greta thought she might need fewer words from now on.
At the apartment, her little brother was crying, although Gladys was pacing back and forth with him, trying to calm him. His temples were pale and bluish.
“Let me,” Helene offered and took Tobias from the maid. “You go and get some lunch for Greta.”
Greta slipped her hand into Gladys’. “I’ll let you look through my glasses,” she said.
As Helene rocked the scrawny boy in her arms, her chest damp from his snot and tears, she felt certain his skin had to remember the touch of his real mother, the only touch that could possibly console him. Filled with pity for him, she rested her lips against his left temple. After being so content with Greta, she felt an abundance of patience and love that she wanted to give to this boy who was breathing noisily through his mouth as if even something as simple as taking in air was burdensome for him. In between breaths, he wailed. She rubbed his hard belly, rocked him against her shoulder as she walked with him. From the living room into the kitchen into the dining room while he wailed, and then that same circle again while he continued to wail.
After years of enjoying her work as a teacher, she had not expected to feel so inadequate as a mother, at least with Tobias who’d either struggle away or cling to her. Sometimes Mrs. Wilson offered to help with the children. Although Helene appreciated her work in the building, she didn’t trust her with the children because Mrs. Wilson envied her the children so obviously. Whenever Helene tried to turn Tobias over to one of the maids who came to the apartment every day for a few hours, the boy would cry even louder, except with Birdie, who had a special affection for him. The oldest of the maids at twenty-four, Birdie Robichaud had a new hair color every month and sang to the children in her nasal voice. But Birdie was not always available. And you couldn’t ask Birdie to take the children to the beach—not even on the hottest day—because she refused to go near water, terrified to see one of the children go under and not come up again, the way she’d seen her sister drown after falling off the earth right next to her while reaching for a yellow flower.
Tobias was hiccuping in Helene’s arms, and when she turned him over to pat his back, she heard a thud against one of the windows that faced the lake. A bird had flown into the bare glass, leaving specks of feather and blood before plummeting. Four other birds had died like that since Helene had arrived, and all because of Stefan’s first wife whose idea it had been to let the light and sky in. Her light and sky were exactly what killed the birds because all they saw was their reflection. Birds didn’t understand about barriers of glass that could kill them. No more, Helene resolved. Tomorrow she’d talk to the seamstress about covering the windows with sheer curtains and drapes. Mrs. Teichman worked for several families in the building. Skillful and energetic, she’d arrive at Helene’s door every Wednesday morning with her flowered suitcase full of patterns, pins, threads, interfacing, buttons, fashion books, and a clean, folded bedsheet that she’d lay over the carpet in the dining room. Curtains would warn the birds. Curtains would make the apartment feel less drafty. Curtains would feel more like home.
Tobias’ cries were not quite as loud as before. Helene hummed to him— “Schlafe mein Prinzchen, scblaf ein…”—hummed the German bedtime song her mother used to sing to her and Leo until Tobias was finally falling asleep, and as she tightened her arms around him to accommodate the weight of sleep, she wished she had another woman to talk to. Someone like Margret. But she couldn’t imagine writing to Margret about her troubles with Tobias b
ecause that would mean admitting that not all was going well in her marriage. Better to send letters to her and to Leo about how the children were growing, about what they’d done together as a family—blueberry picking on Belknap Mountain; excursions on the mail boat that stopped at many of the islands; a train ride to Concord to buy furniture that replaced the wicker of the first wife.
It felt odd to Helene to be an immigrant in this country where no one could see her otherness by looking at her. How she wished she had the physical signs to mark her as a foreigner before strangers spoke to her because that would take the surprise from their faces when she answered, would make them approach her with the expectation of that otherness. From Stefan she knew that the town wasn’t much used to foreigners. Except for the Greek man who worked at the lumberyard and a group of Japanese laborers who stayed in apartments assigned to them by the hosiery factory, Winnipesaukee was made up of families who’d lived here for generations and hadn’t traveled far beyond their hometown. Although there were quite a few French Canadians, including the lamplighter and the two barbers, Helene didn’t think of them as being foreign since Canada was just a few hours away by train.
It was difficult for newcomers to fit in, though Stefan—despite the heartache he’d brought to the families of his dead wives—had been absorbed by the town, although his accent reminded all of them that he had come from a different place. About him they could speak with pride, point to the ornate building that elevated the town’s reputation among neighboring communities. A building like that gave you cause and desire to look after your own property with even greater care than before; to replace your entrance door or shutters, say, with fancier versions of what you used to have; to paint your walls before they showed the slightest wear; to lay a path of bricks right to your front step to keep the mud off your floors.
For Helene, living in America was a constant shifting between discovery and loss. She liked how the houses were separated by gardens, not constructed side against side as in Germany. Liked the vastness of her new country, the dense forests, the mountaintops that held snow till late in the spring. But she didn’t like the taste of lamb—a bit wild, she thought. American shoes were flimsy, she decided, and though the town’s major industry was a shoe factory that shipped merchandise throughout the country, she ordered the shoes for her family from Germany, along with rosehip tea and delicacies like marzipan or the strawberry syrup she liked to pour over her puddings. Since American bread was fluffy and left your belly empty half an hour after eating, she baked her own solid-crust Graubrot. Through furniture, tablecloths, and paintings, she created Germany for herself in her husband’s house.