by Ursula Hegi
Pearl lit a cigarette and held it between her thumb and forefinger as if she were a man. “My shoes—they’re hardly made to walk in snow, Sweetie.”
Helene motioned to Pearl’s high-heeled sling backs. “You were wearing shoes like that?”
“Always.”
“I’d break my neck. My stepdaughter, though—she’d love your shoes. She doesn’t like to wear the ones I order from Germany.”
Pearl contemplated Helene’s feet: black solid leather laced to the ankles; chunky heels. “You are a very independent woman,” she said.
When Pearl arrived in Helene’s life like this—all at once, jostling past her shyness and reserve—Helene knew she was a manifestation of her yearning for a friend to take the place of Margret, who grew fainter with each of her brief, hasty notes. Pearl thought Helene was the most intelligent woman she’d ever known, and she flew at her with confidences and questions, with genuine admiration that astounded Helene who felt huge and slow in comparison. Still, she was so dazzled by Pearl that she dismissed the German custom of developing friendships slowly. Pearl was everything she was not—glamorous, vivacious, vain—and yet, with her she could talk in a way Stefan would not understand. Both were wives of men who had been married before. Both had been transplanted, leaving everyone they knew behind.
Within a week of meeting Pearl, Helene found herself telling her about all the years she had loved Stefan secretly, and she did not flinch when Pearl counted on her fingers the men she’d slept with before marrying Nate.
“If I hadn’t married Nate, I’d be counting toes by now.”
“Maybe that’s what toes are for.”
Being around Pearl made Helene funny and outrageous. It also made her aware of how she’d been raised to say and do what was proper, and how immensely bored she was with that. And Pearl, she felt dignified when she was with Helene, smart, valued for her thoughts. Men usually had preconceived notions about her, but with Helene she was someone she could have been all along.
Since Pearl had lived on both coasts and had even worked as an entertainer on ocean liners, she found the town of Winnipesaukee confining, but she provided for her own entertainment by giving parties every Saturday evening, some in Nate’s railroad car, others in her music room that she decorated with peach-colored velour drapes and upholstery. Sometimes there’d be dancing. Leaning against the white piano Nate had ordered from New York, she’d sing for her guests in her low, low voice, one shoulder cocked above the other. Often she invited local musicians. Though most of them had not performed in public, she quickly found out who was talented—the old organist from the Lutheran church; the florist’s sister-in-law who played the saxophone; Mr. Bell from the second floor with his violin—and for a few hours she would make them feel famous.
Pearl had no problem understanding Helene’s accent, and she never asked her to repeat what she’d just said. For her, everything that came from Helene was profound. With Pearl here, the house felt different to Helene, fuller. Whenever the two women wanted to reach each other, they’d rap against the heating pipes, a signal that would carry to the other’s apartment: two raps—come to the window; one rap—open the dumbwaiter. Helene would lean from her window or into the dumbwaiter to shout down that she was going for a walk or a swim, and Pearl would yell back that she’d meet her in the lobby. As their voices flickered up and down the dumbwaiter shaft, their echoes trembled into other regions of the building. Typically, Pearl would run out of pepper or butter or onions—never lipstick or shampoo—and if the dumbwaiter was in the basement and the item light enough, she’d span a silk scarf in the opening and catch whatever Helene dropped from above. “I’ll get it back to you,” she’d holler, but she never returned anything, and Helene— who would rather lend than borrow any day—did not remind her.
This woman with her raunchy laugh who cursed so elegantly, who mooched shamelessly but gave generously of herself, was Helene’s only friend in America, and at first Helene worried that their friendship might end as abruptly as it had begun. But gradually she trusted that it would still be there the next day. The next year.
Once the evenings got milder in April, the two women would sit on the flat roof of the Wasserburg on folding chairs and talk. A vertigo tug at their stomachs, they’d rest their feet on the low brick wall that ran along the edge of the roof. Since this wall was only two feet high, and the ventilation pipes had pointed tops that could impale a running child, the roof was off-limits to children unless they were with an adult.
Far above the town and the spires of its three churches, the women would sip coffee or Pearl’s favorite, peach brandy straight from snifters or mixed with champagne and ice cream in tall glasses. They’d lean back in their chairs and keep talking while in the houses below them lights multiplied and the green surface of the lake turned flat and fused with the dark shoreline. Each time the elevator was in service, they’d hear a buzz—not unlike that from a thousand bees. Looking forward to that ritual of evenings with Pearl often sustained Helene through days that belonged almost entirely to the children. Recently she’d been worrying about Greta who was not doing well in school. Her ability to appreciate details that others didn’t stop to notice—the shadow of a leaf, the smell of a stone, the texture of a feather—made her forget where she was or what she’d been told to do.
Whenever Pearl visited at the apartment, Helene’s days felt lighter, and even the caring for Tobias became less complicated because Pearl was intrigued by the small boy who attached himself to her with quick searching attention as if perhaps she was the one who would make everything right for him. Birdie, whose favorite he’d been at first, had shrunk from that intensity, but Pearl was accustomed to attention and enjoyed the child.
One afternoon, when Tobias’ belly hurt because his Aunt Pearl was drinking tea with his mother again, he toddled away from them—they don’t see me they don’t—and into Greta’s room where the dollhouse was set up on the table. His mother had said he wasn’t allowed to play with it till he was older. He touched it with one finger. Climbed on a chair. Brought his face against the front of the house. Just when he was wondering how to get in there and sit on the tiny furniture, his arm swiped the house to the floor.
As Helene rushed in, her first worry was for Tobias’ safety, her next worry how to explain the damage to Stefan’s mother.
“You don’t have to tell her anything,” Pearl said as she rocked Tobias who was crying furious tears because the dollhouse hadn’t let him inside and now it was broken. “Sshhh,” Pearl sang out. “Sshhh … Things break. That’s just the way it goes, Sweetie. No reason to cry.” She glanced up at Helene. “All children break things. It’s natural. Let me see … what did I break when I was your age? Dishes, I’m sure. Oh yes, my mother’s necklace. Fake pearls, but still… I pulled at them when she wore them, and they scattered all over the floor.”
“Stefan’s mother told me to only let Greta play with it. She’ll say it’s my fault.”
“Aren’t you lucky then that you are an ocean away.”
“I guess I am.” Helene reached for Tobias. “Come here.”
He hid his face against his Aunt Pearl’s neck.
“Go to your mama.” She positioned him in his mother’s arms. “Here.”
“I’m not angry with you.” His mother rocked him on her hip, and he felt her breath skim over his hair while she talked to his Aunt Pearl. “… but I know she’ll ask Leo and Gertrud about that dollhouse.”
“If they ever get here.”
“Don’t say that. Leo promised. Maybe he’ll come alone.”
“You’d like that better anyhow…. He can tell your mother-in-law that the dollhouse is just lovely, that you’ve painted the roof and shutters—what? Orange? Green? And that your friend Pearl Bloom has it in her apartment right now because she is sewing tiny lace curtains for the windows.”
“You don’t even know how to sew.”
“Exactly.” Pearl nodded. “It’s a beautiful story. Your
mother-in-law will picture me with a tiny needle sewing tiny curtains. And you’ll have your frigging peace.” She reached out to tickle behind Tobias’ knees. “That’s the most ticklish place on my body. See, for you too. Now what do you think, Tobias? You want an orange roof? Or a green one?”
Helene was sure her brother would like Pearl, and she looked forward to introducing them, but his visit kept getting delayed. At first it had to do with Gertrud’s fear of the ship sinking, and when she finally agreed to make the voyage despite that fear, they had to delay it again because she was not well.
“She’s not talking to anyone,” Leo wrote. “She lies in bed all day.”
“We’ll have a bed for her here,” Helene wrote.
“It’s more serious than that,” Leo wrote.
“She won’t have to talk to any of us.”
To Pearl she said, “I don’t think they want to come here.”
“Why don’t you go then?”
But before Helene could decide, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, and Germany followed by declaring war on Russia, France, and Belgium. Gertrud sent a jumbled letter about bloodying her knee and about Leo fighting Russians in Poland and about Emil Hesping’s motorcycle. “It’s my fault if Leo doesn’t come back.”
Helene could not picture her brother as a soldier: he was too gentle to be an effective fighter, too considerate. Every day as she read newspapers, she’d fight off images of Leo dead, or about to die with blood on his throat and chest, or half-buried in a ditch as he claws at the dirt that fills his mouth and eyes. Leo—and when she’d try to dislodge those pictures with memories of Leo, she’d find it impossible to evoke him as a man. Only as a boy: age three, playing by the brook, hands muddy, face so sweaty that his pale curls stick to his forehead as if painted on; age four, learning his chess moves with such concentration that everyone calls him kleiner Professor; age eleven, at the gymnast’s competition, swinging from the trapeze with such grace that he appears to be flying.
“He is stronger than he looks, your brother.” Stefan would comfort her. “And he’s smart. That counts for more than physical strength when it comes to surviving.” He didn’t tell her how worried he was about Leo and several of his friends who were soldiers. Though Emil Hesping had managed to stay out of combat, Michel and Kurt were fighting, and Stefan had no idea what was happening to them.
Greta’s grandmother asked about Leo every Sunday when she came to the house with chocolate for the children. She’d tilt her head to let Stefan kiss her cheek and offer a bouquet of flowers to Helene. That November, when she arrived to celebrate Greta’s eighth birthday, Helene was crying as she opened the door for her.
“He’s alive,” she sobbed. “My brother … he’s alive.”
Carefully, Lelia Flynn placed both arms around this woman she’d never embraced before, this woman who was taller and wider than she. Taller and wider than her Elizabeth had been. “I’m so glad about your brother. So very glad.”
Helene disengaged herself, pulled a letter from the pocket of her gray pleated skirt. “From Stefan’s parents.”
Lelia unfolded it. “I can’t read that. It’s not in English.”
“I forgot.” Helene laughed. Started crying all over again. “Here’s what they say.” She translated: “Leo is injured, but only in one knee. The left one. They operated on him in Poland and put in a plate of steel where his kneecap used to be.”
Lelia flinched. “That must be painful.”
“I’m so grateful he’s back home alive.”
“So am I.”
“That injury is saving his life. He has trouble walking and is useless now as a soldier.”
Since it was an uncommonly warm afternoon, Helene and Lelia took the children down to the lake, where they sat on striped canvas chairs, blankets spread across their legs, and talked while Tobias and Greta played in the green rowboat that was tied to the side of the dock. Leaves were blowing across the boat, and while Greta tried to catch them, Tobias was building a tower from his alphabet blocks on the seat. When he was done, he rocked the boat, whinnying like a horse as the blocks tumbled down, and then stacked them up again.
“Look at those two,” Helene said, “playing like that… So innocent.”
“They’re children. Of course they’re innocent.”
“I mean innocent of what’s happening in Europe.”
“We’re lucky we’re far away. And that we’re neutral. President Wilson is going to keep it that way.”
“I think of it a lot, the war over there, worry about it before I fall asleep, wake up worrying about people I know, their safety….”
“Your brother, thank God, is back.”
“Yes, but other men in our neighborhood are still gone, including Stefan’s friends and Axel Lambert.”
“Who is he?”
“The biology teacher from the school where I used to work.”
Each time his building blocks collapsed, Tobias whinnied. He couldn’t hear his sister above his noise because he was so totally enjoying the water and the wind, letting them fill his eyes, his ears, his entire head until there was only blue, a far-distant blue so all encompassing and familiar that he made whooping noises, rocking the boat back and forth.
To Helene his frolicking seemed disrespectful, considering the horrors in Europe. And yet she envied both children their carefreeness. “Tobias? Calm down.”
He didn’t even look toward her.
“Calm down!”
Lelia bent toward her. “May I ask you something?”
“Yes.”
“This biology teacher—was he important to you in your life?”
“He was a friend. A colleague.”
“The way you said his name … Ochsal…?”
“Axel. It’s pronounced Axel.”
Satisfied, Lelia Flynn nodded. “Men like that… they may not be important to us when we are young, may be a bother even, but they’re the men we remember when we’re old because their fascination with us will forever stay the same. You see … it was never tested. Never had a chance to fade in marriage.”
“I always thought of marriage as deepening that… fascination.”
Lelia didn’t respond. She was frowning at the solid and unbroken line of mountains in the distance where the sky was filling with puffy white clouds that looked as if something were bubbling up behind the mountains.
“Are you warm enough?” Helene asked.
Lelia nodded and rubbed her arms. “Did Stefan tell you that his second wife didn’t like me?”
Helene shook her head.
“She never used the Venetian trays I gave her for when she married Elizabeth’s husband. I—I’m sorry. Your husband. When she married your husband.”
“I never knew Sara.” Gently, Helene added, “Or your daughter.”
Lelia raised her chin toward the clouds that were moving closer, flecking the dark surface of the lake wherever it held the pale reflections of the clouds’ bellies.
“Maybe she used the trays on days you were not here,” Helene suggested.
Lelia shook her head. “I would have known.”
“But how?”
“I would have known. I gave them to her because I liked her. Not as much as you, though.”
It seemed proper to say thank you, especially to a woman of her parents’ generation. But Helene couldn’t bring herself to do that. “Calm down,” she called out to Tobias.
But he didn’t hear her, didn’t see her when she stood up and called out to him to stop rocking it and sit still, and it wasn’t until Greta screamed that he quit shouting and froze, staring at where she was pointing, his arm, his right arm, wedged between boat and dock while the blue—a different and dangerous blue not at all like the far-distant blue inside his head—drained through his stomach, heavy and sick. He howled.
As Helene ran toward the dock, she felt guilty as though she had brought on his injury herself—the biter in me—by feeling jealous of his carefreeness. Before she and Le
lia could reach the boat, Greta pulled her brother free. His breath struck her neck with each howl, and his hand felt cold to Greta. His arm was so limp inside the sleeve of his jacket that Greta gathered it against her chest. Because touching is the other half of seeing. Touching enters through your fingertips and paints the image of what you touch inside your eyeballs. All at once, she felt something shift within her brother’s arm, and his howls ceased. Drawing in one startled sob, he leaned against Greta, feeling very tired.
After Helene carried Tobias to her chair, he lay curled in her lap like a much younger child, playing with the lace cuffs of her white blouse, absorbing the scent of her hands and her gray pleats, and as she stroked his fine, black hair, she found comfort in being able to soothe this odd little boy who so often spurned all tenderness, and she felt closer to him than ever before. She relished his silence, his yielding to the solace she could give him as she ran one finger along his temple and cheek, sticky from tears. If only she could give this kind of comfort to a child of her own. Her throat burned with abrupt yearning. What if holding this boy is as close as I’ll ever come to being a mother? Not enough. It’s not enough. Never will be. And I’m getting older. Thirty-five last month. Where did the years of marriage go? Three and a half years. If I don’t have a child soon, then when? Even Margret who used to think she didn’t want children now had twins. It struck Helene, the irony, that both she and Stefan were grieving—she for the child she would like to have, he still for the other wives.
Her eyes followed Greta and Lelia as they strolled along the beach where shallow waves had left a scalloped edge on the sand. Tobias was dozing, uncommonly quiet, and he didn’t wake up until Stefan arrived to take them to Greta’s birthday dinner at the Cadeau du Lac.
When she told him what had happened with Tobias’ arm, he blew on it and sang, “Heile heile Segen, morgen gibt es Regen …”—“Heal heal, blessings, tomorrow there’ll be rain. …”
Tobias pulled his arm away. “I don’t want rain.”
“It will make your arm better.”