by Ursula Hegi
“Join us,” the tenants told Helene. They whispered to each other how lively the third Mrs. Blau looked today, and how much easier the language seemed to come to her. “Join us and eat, please. Everything is so delicious.”
But she kept flitting about, ladling two kinds of punch—spiked with rum for the grownups, plain for the children—and to keep from blushing, she tried to distract herself by fretting about candles and about how much she would miss real candles on the tree next year and in the years to come, because that’s what she was used to as far back as she could remember, candles, real candles, that’s what I grew up with, real candles, lots of candles. … From across the lobby she felt her husband watching her, felt her skin, her entire body flush blazing hot until she was the candle, the only candle allowed. Allowed? She moved away from his gaze, found Mr. Bell, urged him to play Christmas carols on his violin. “For the children,” she said, “oh, please,” and thought she heard Stefan cry out please in the dark, please, and then Mrs. Evans was slicing the fruitcake she’d brought, a moist loaf studded with fragments of red, please, while Miss Garland led the children in “Silent Night,” a melody Helene knew well, and as she sang along the words she’d learned as a girl—“Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht….”—another voice picked up those same words behind her, came closer, closer yet, but she didn’t have to turn to know it belonged to her husband, please oh please, and as he held her there with his voice, held both of them, she let her voice fuse with his and felt the blushing surge downward, not up, down, down to her groin, please, hot and wicked and pleasurable all at once.
After that, blushing was never quite the same again. Now that she knew how to take that panic—I’m going to blush—and redirect it to where it met her rapture, she could gather it at will—now … down—send it there. She began to think of her orgasms as blushing, began to welcome that hot rush that used to mortify her. Amazing how powerful it could make you feel. And no one else knows. Or has to know. All you had to do was think no, I don’t want to blush, no—and that familiar heat would rise through you. After that, it was yours. To send where you wanted it. And you didn’t even have to touch yourself.
It could happen at the grocery store. At the beach. In the laundry room. At Magill’s Fine Clothing. In church even. Helene liked to play with how high she’d let the blush rise. If you sent it down too soon, its pulse faded quickly. The trick was to let it wash up beyond your waist, to trap it as it raced across your breasts red hot and then—before it spent itself on your neck and face—to force it down. Yours. Alone.
For this you did not need a husband.
Knowing this way to pleasure herself made it bearable for Helene when Stefan broke away so quickly after reaching for her at night. Though she longed for children of her own, she knew it was too soon. Being a mother to Stefan’s children was the hardest work she had ever done. She used to feel far more competent teaching a class of twenty. Still, sometimes she would let herself fantasize about having babies, speculating in what ways they would resemble both her and Stefan. She could see parts of him in his children: Greta had his slender nose and could be quietly observant like he; Tobias had his black hair and tenacity.
But whenever she tried to talk to Stefan about having a child of her own, he’d grow quiet.
No need to rush him.
Or myself.
There will be time.
And till then she had plenty to do. Starting with manners. American table manners, she thought, were atrocious, and even Stefan, who’d learned the proper ways as a boy, had become careless. But already she’d noticed a change in him. He’d watched her teach Greta how to behave. To say thank you. “No elbows on the table,” Helene would coach her. “Only your wrists.” Though Greta was old enough to hold her knife in her right hand and her fork in her left, all this was too soon, of course, for Tobias. He wasn’t even toilet trained yet. At home, Helene knew, she would have started him at six months, the way her mother and grandmother had done before her.
Often Helene felt tired at the thought of all the other work she had waiting for her, not only in the apartment, but also in the garden above the garage, where she trimmed bushes and planted camomile along with flowers that reminded her of home: tulips and geraniums, snapdragons and pansies. And this was how Emma would remember her grandmother many years later—kneeling in the rich dirt between the flower beds, half moons of earth under her fingernails. She would remember the clean scent of soap as her grandmother scrubbed her hands in the kitchen with a bristle brush, remember her Aunt Greta’s stories of playing in the elevated garden with Uncle Tobias, gathering empty beechnuts that the squirrels left on the paths and heaping them into pyramids that they stabilized with earth and water.
It was impossible to adore a wife whose shoulders stood a hand’s width above yours, who looked down into your eyes instead of looking up at you, who had known you when your nose used to be runny, when you’d come home muddy after playing in the brook. But it was good to depend on her competence. To value her dignity. To admire her brilliant mind. The least he could do to protect her was curb his lust. And so he surrounded her with possessions instead—crystal bedroom lamps with candle-shaped lights, a set of the finest silver, Persian rugs—but Helene would have given up all that to be adored by him. He suspected that her love was larger than his, and he felt uneasy because his feelings were unequal to hers.
When the people of Winnipesaukee complimented him on his children’s manners, he felt proud. Though he never went back to church, he approved that Helene took the children there, and he tolerated that she invited Father Albin to dinner once a month to please Lelia Flynn. Ever since Hardy Flynn had died from heart problems, Lelia had taken to arriving at the Wasserburg right after mass, and it cheered her to sit next to the priest whose heavy thighs strained against his cassock. She’d ask him how he’d come up with the thoughts for that morning’s sermon, and they’d end up discussing his kidney stones and her arthritis. It gave Stefan a certain pleasure, the priest coming to his house like that. The house of God. The house of Stefan. Blasphemy.
About those nights she took him, he and Helene never spoke. Both acted as if those nights didn’t happen between them. And yet they did—though not often. And never when they felt close to each other. The only times Helene could forget herself like this—forget everything she had been taught about marriage and manners—was when she got angry with him because he felt far away from her, say, or had waited too long to reach for her. And though it bewildered her—being this brazen and powerful woman, so unlike anyone she used to encounter in her fantasies—she felt exhilarated because this woman was someone she would have liked to be at times, this woman who didn’t care about being proper, this woman who laughed with ease and took what she wanted.
Those nights—they shocked and aroused Stefan, made him feel oddly virile and yet helpless. Though he didn’t understand what was happening—a lady never indulges like that—he did not want Helene to stop. Had Elizabeth or Sara chosen to force themselves upon him—not that they would, not that they ever would—he could have lifted them from him in one simple motion. But Helene was too strong, too heavy. Helene was broad in the hips and shoulders. Helene was agile. Dangerous perhaps.
At work while seasoning bouillabaisse or brushing raspberry glaze on his marzipan cake, he would catch himself wondering if he could win against her were she ever to wrestle him in earnest.
But of course that was an absurd thought.
Something to dismiss as soon as it stirred you.
Because what kind of husband would wrestle with his wife?
Those nights, they never happened when he reached for her, but if she turned from him silently—hurt or angry about one thing or another again—he might awaken to discover her above him, blocking the moon as she crushed him into the mattress.
From there, of course, it became easy to figure out how to get her there.
Because that’s what he began to crave, really, secretly—to have her take him. To h
ave it happen and then not speak about it. And he could prolong his excitement by watching her the following day, and by letting her catch him watching her for signs of what had gone on between them, while he’d wait for the familiar red to stain her neck and face. But that flush of embarrassment occurred less and less, and then only for an instant, while her eyes half closed and her lips curved upward, mystifying him.
Some evenings after dinner Greta liked to seclude herself in the delivery box—a low compartment between the apartment and hallway for the delivery of milk, groceries, and newspapers. Each tenant had one, and its wooden doors could be unlatched from either the kitchen or hallway. Too tight for anyone but a child to fit in, the dark box was lined with metal and stayed cool even on the hottest of days. You frequently had to scour it to get rid of the sour smell that rose from spilled drops of milk. Greta didn’t mind the smell. Inside her cubicle, with both doors shut, she liked to play her mother’s flute, long notes that sounded like the calls of large birds flying through the night and made Helene wish she could follow her stepdaughter and shed the absurd habit of walking on earth in sensible shoes.
Eyes wide open in the dark, Greta would see translucent clouds against a silver sky, and her wooden flute would reel them in, those clouds, sucking their luster into the cubicle till it glowed. When Helene called for her—time to get ready for bed—Greta reversed her notes, releasing the clouds and the light to where they belonged, and as she emerged, face radiant, her pupils black pinpricks behind her glasses, Helene felt she had reclaimed her from a place far beyond the house. It made her want to treat Greta with special care—reverence almost—and offer her lavish refreshments as you would to an honored guest who has traveled a great distance and won’t stay for long.
A guest like Leo.
All that winter Helene looked forward to his visit, imagining the places she would show him and Gertrud. They were getting married the third Sunday of April, and for their wedding present Helene and Stefan had already sent them round-trip tickets to America on the Kaiserin Auguste Victoria, a German ocean liner with a winter garden and a grand staircase. But about a week before they were to start their trip, another ship sank on its first voyage to New York, and Leo sent a telegram, postponing the trip. “If it were just me, I would come anyhow, but Gertrud doesn’t feel safe.”
A letter followed. Gertrud, he wrote, had first wanted to go ahead with their trip even though some townspeople kept asking if she wasn’t afraid to cross the ocean, considering how even the best of ships could sink. “Stefan and Helene got there safely,” she told them. “I’m not worried.”
But then Herr Pastor Schüler had given a sermon about five thousand millionaires who had drowned when their ship rammed into an iceberg. “There’s a lesson in that for all of you,” he declared, and while he proceeded to preach about greed and icebergs that really turned out to be the fire of hell, the altar boys went around with their shiny collection plates.
After mass, when Leo pointed out to him that not five thousand, but twenty-two hundred people had been aboard the Titanic and that seven hundred had survived, the priest pretended not to hear.
“Such hubris. And they said even God himself couldn’t sink their ship,” he announced in his sermon voice, the kind of voice that allowed for no doubt when he spoke about sin.
After listening to the priest, Gertrud realized she could not be on a ship. Any ship. At least not yet.
“But the one we’re booked on is different,” Leo told her. “Faster than other ocean liners.” Still, he could not persuade her.
“The Titanic was supposed to be unsinkable,” she told him. “God slaughters those who challenge him.”
“I understand,” Helene wrote back to her brother. “Maybe you’ll be here in the summer. It’s a better time to be here anyhow because you can swim in the lake and hike up Belknap Mountain with us.” She described to him how much the beach was part of her daily life in the summer. Instead of walking to the Rhein and changing clothes behind some bushes as she had in Burgdorf, she now could wear a swimsuit beneath a bathrobe, take the elevator down to the lobby and walk out, down the grassy slope and across the sand to the dock. She ended her letter by telling him, “We’ll have a wedding dinner for you in our lobby. …”
She sealed the envelope, returned her stationery and blue ink to her rosewood desk, and walked to the kitchen where Gladys was getting lunch ready for the children. When Tobias darted away from the maid and toward Helene, she dodged him and instantly felt like a bad mother, the most wicked of stepmothers right out of fairy tales. Then, of course, she had to make it up to Tobias, had to read to him, play with him, let him come along to do the laundry in the basement. In the drying room, where the air was so hazy and silver with steam that it would have been easy to lose a pillow case, say, or even a small child, she let Tobias hold the ends of wet sheets as she straightened them and draped them across the heating rods that were hooked up to the boiler.
Though it took twice as long than when she did them alone, she stayed patient; yet, as always, Tobias wanted more, and when Helene finally tried to pry herself away in the elevator and the boy still clung to her with those tiny claws, she felt a sudden rage. The presence of the biter. She had not asked Stefan to bring her here, even though it was what she had longed for. But she had not asked. And she had come to his children with her best, her very best, had come to them ready to love them. Yet it was only Greta who responded to her with affection. Whatever she did for the boy was not right. Sometimes he wanted more of her. Other times less of her. In any case—never what she was giving him.
He wants his real mother.
She felt her fury ebb and right away felt sorry for Tobias, who stood next to her in the elevator, mouth twitching, about to cry. “Come here.” She picked him up. Carried him into the apartment. Made cinnamon toast for him. Washed his hands. His face. Sat with him by the kitchen window and promised herself to be even more patient. He pointed up to the fan that was set into a boxy recess in the wall next to the window, and though she had a dozen other things to do, she let him touch the metal pole with the hook that hung from the fan, helped him to open the top of the little trap door to let air in. She didn’t much like those fans because wasps liked to nest in there, a nuisance Mr. Wilson took care of by cleaning the fans out.
Once she was doing better with Tobias, she’d have children of her own. To balance the two Stefan already had. She knew of other women over thirty who’d had babies. But what if it was her failure with Tobias that kept Stefan from being closer to her? Or maybe it was the other way around. Maybe if Stefan were closer to her, Tobias would be too. Maybe he felt his father’s separateness from her.
As Tobias blew tiny spit bubbles and played with the buttons on her blouse, it occurred to her that if Stefan were to write home about the new stepmother, he’d probably describe her as an unnatural mother, impatient, frightened even. Sara had been a much better stepmother—she knew this from Stefan’s letters, knew how gentle Sara used to be with Greta, how natural. But Sara had only inherited one child—the more likable of the two.
Leo barely mentioned the trip in his reply but wrote instead about the tournament his chess club was organizing for its one-hundred-year anniversary. Twelve other clubs were traveling to Burgdorf, and all trophies would be engraved with the profile of its founder, Karl Tannenschneider. Helene shook her head. Like most of the women in Burgdorf, she had little regard for Herr Tannenschneider, while the men spoke of him with respect because his passion for chess had been so great that he’d forsaken his wife and children.
That Christmas, Helene sent travel presents to Leo and Gertrud: a small alarm clock; two collapsible cups; maps of New York City and New Hampshire; toothbrushes that folded to half their size.
“She just isn’t ready yet,” Leo wrote.
Helene’s frustration with Gertrud left her in no mood to celebrate anyone’s marriage, least of all that of Nate Bloom; but Stefan was curious about the cabaret singer Nate had
just married after a two-day courtship. The instant Helene saw Pearl Bloom, she noticed two things about her: that she did not wear a corset like other women, and that she looked barely twenty—just about half the age of her husband who was telling everyone how he’d seen her in Boston at one of her performances and had invited her to have champagne and smoked salmon with him in his railroad car.
Small and feisty, Pearl Bloom fastened onto Helene as soon as they met, ignoring her other guests. “I was swept away by Nate.” Her voice was deep. Dramatic. “Simply swept away. And by the time I noticed that the train was going, I wouldn’t have stopped it for anything.” Her bobbed hair fell back from her ears. “Hell, you must know how that is.”
Helene had to laugh. “Don’t we all?” She rather liked how that came out, the kind of response a woman far more experienced than she would have thought of.
Pearl looked at her closely. “Besides … it was snowing.”
“What does snow have to do with it?”