by Ursula Hegi
“My arm doesn’t hurt.”
In his restaurant, a table on the glass porch was set with white linen and red balloons. Greta’s feet itched from sand that had gotten into her shoes and between her toes. Her face itched too whenever she glanced at her brother’s arm. Her father had made her favorite food, flat noodles with white sauce and thin slices of veal, but Tobias wasn’t eating. When her father glared at him, Tobias speared one noodle and sucked at one end of it until all of it had disappeared between his lips.
Stefan felt a familiar disappointment when Tobias chewed so reluctantly. There was something about the boy that didn’t measure up—a softness … a shrillness. What bothered Stefan too was the head banging, something Tobias still did though Dr. Miles had said he was sure to outgrow it. But so far that hadn’t happened, and usually the boy’s fine hair was matted in back of his head.
As Tobias glanced up from his plate, he felt judged by the lack of faith in his father’s eyes, and since he didn’t know what it meant or what he could do to have his father regard him in a different way, he pulled the memory of his father’s expression deep inside himself, nurtured it so that, oddly, in the years to come, it would give him a greater sense of what defined him, something that was in contrast to his father, something that was all his and that he could count on being.
Greta could feel him shrinking from their father, could feel her stepmother blaming herself for Tobias’ injury, though Tobias was the one who’d caused it, could feel her father’s concern for her grandmother whose face and body had become gaunt and whose skin had lost its pink ever since the death of Greta’s grandfather.
“Here,” her father was saying as he served her grandmother another slice of veal, though she’d barely touched the first.
“No, thank you.”
“You have to eat more, Lelia,” he said, but he was thinking about the loan. Whenever he saw Lelia, he thought about that loan. He still hadn’t made any payments, though the apartment house was profitable. But it was essential to have some funds set aside in case the house needed repairs. And it was not as if Lelia needed the money—she was far wealthier than he. If he were to mention it, she’d only wave his words away with her beautiful hands—so much like Elizabeth’s hands—and tell him she wasn’t worried, that it would all belong to Greta some day anyhow.
Lelia pushed the veal aside with her fork. “I don’t need much food.”
Helene wondered if her husband and Lelia had been like that with each other when Elizabeth had still been alive. It occurred to her that, if she imagined herself out of this picture and placed Elizabeth here instead, they would be more like a family. Lelia was small boned like her daughter. As Helene saw the daughter in the features of the mother, she felt superfluous.
She saw herself lean toward Lelia. “What was your daughter like?” she asks. The words come out in German, and oddly Lelia Flynn understands them and answers her in German.
“Not at all like you,” she tells Helene. “Elizabeth had more presence, more class. Charisma.”
Stop it, Helene admonished herself, but the imaginary conversation continued while Stefan and the children seemed oblivious to it. “It was better between Stefan and me from a distance,” Helene confides.
“It always is,” Lelia says.
“And I wish we could go back to that.”
“I treasured Mr. Flynn most when he was at the bank and not right next to me. Maybe if you went back to Germany—”
“Then he’d be lost to me altogether.”
“There’d be another wife soon… ja.”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you, if I left?”
“It doesn’t matter who the new wife is. You or someone else. What matters is that there is one at all. And that she is not Elizabeth.”
“That I am not Elizabeth.”
“If there had been only one wife,” Lelia Flynn says, “if he had lined up the three of you and chosen one … Do you really believe he would have chosen you? Or that Sara from the bakery?”
“Yes,” Helene lies. “I know he would have chosen me.”
Late that evening when Tobias and Greta were asleep and Stefan was still at the restaurant, Helene opened his roll-top desk and stared at the two wedding portraits he kept in the small left drawer, at his posed smile as he turned to his previous wives—he would have never chosen me—and she felt heavy with the weight of her body and the weight of her duty toward the children of these women. But at least Elizabeth and Sara had not lived in these rooms. Though they had planned the Wasserburg with Stefan, she was the first of his wives to share it with him.
To replace them in his heart was impossible.
To feel their presence in these rooms would be unbearable.
As an old woman Helene would take out those photos again—sepia toned on stiff paper—and the other wives would seem identical in their naivete as they smiled without the knowledge that they already carried their deaths within themselves. She’d be seized by a great compassion for them, their youth, their lack of insight into Stefan. How could they have possibly understood him? She had aged with him while they had stayed the age they’d died: young, graceful… forever. And if she compared that to what she had been to him—companion, partner, confidante—she measured more. Far more.
She was still awake when he came to bed, and as his wide palm settled upon her belly, she lifted her silk nightgown for him and waited; but as she felt her body arching toward his in the sum of her yearning, she suddenly couldn’t endure the thought of him removing himself from within her again, stealing the child that was meant to be hers, the child that should have been hers by now. In the flicker of the bedside candle, she dug her fingers into his buttocks and held him there, fused to her, though he struggled to tear himself from her. An uncommon heat between them, she followed him through the rise and the letting down and for a few moments— moments of incredible nearness she would still cherish decades later—he buried his face against her neck with words of tenderness unlike any he’d said to her before. His breath became faint as he pressed his lips against her skin; but then, as though he’d just returned to himself, he heaved himself from her and sat on the side of the bed.
“Don’t you ever—” His voice sounded angry. Afraid. “Don’t you ever do that again.”
She felt his warmth damp between her thighs and, like a thief, tilted her hips upward to contain him within herself.
“I don’t want to lose you too, Lenchen.”
“You’ll never lose me,” she said urgently and believed it, too, though she knew how common it was for women to die that way, and how frightened her husband was of burying yet another wife. It struck her how sad it was: in other areas of his life he had succeeded, had become all he’d dreamed of being, and yet he lacked the power to keep those he loved alive. Elizabeth. Sara. Agnes. But not me. Taking his face between her palms, she forced him to look into her eyes. “You will never lose me,” she repeated slowly.
“How can you know that?”
“I want children.”
“No.”
She pulled the sheet to her throat, felt its edge with the eyelet embroidery against her chin.
“No,” he said again. “We already have two.”
A deep sense of betrayal rooted itself within her. He had never wanted her for himself. Only for his children. Humiliated by the force of her love for him, she felt furious at herself for ever believing he could love her too. And it was at this moment that she stopped trying to love his children as if they were her own.
“Children that are mine,” she whispered, her voice hoarse, rough. “Children that are ours.” She thought of how she longed to be pregnant while other women she knew used means to prevent a baby. Like Pearl, who sprinkled peach brandy on a small rubber sponge she’d hollowed out on one side. To the other side she’d sewn a thin string so she could pull it back out.
“Lenchen …,” Stefan said gently. And reminded himself: Make sure there’s enough parsley. Lemon too.
He touched her shoulder. “Lenchen—”
“No.” She shifted her entire body from him.
His hand fell from her. “I couldn’t bear to lose you, Lenchen.”
Had she answered him, she could have told him there were ways other than death of losing someone.
1915–1919
The morning she told him she was pregnant, he felt tricked. He stared into her joyous eyes, at the brave curve of her chin, and in one terrible moment her face was replaced by her death mask. Mute with grief, he saw himself standing at her grave—a grave wide enough to hold an entire family and to contain her too, his third wife, whose boldness and tenderness have confused him. Prayers rise above the graves like wind, move through the moss that sways from the branches, brush its coarse strands against his face as he runs from the grave down the path toward the brook and its stillness, runs in the mist while listening so closely to that stillness that he hears birds, and as he looks toward the lake, all sky and all water are silver-gray, fused by the hazy mass of mountains.
As he pulled Helene into his arms to keep her alive, she leaned into him, waiting for the words of love she imagined behind his urgent hold. But he pressed his forehead against her shoulder, making it impossible for her to see his expression.
“Tell me,” she said, afraid that if he didn’t speak she would retreat from him even further.
But he didn’t trust himself to bring those images of her death into words, a death for which he alone carried blame—as with Sara; with Elizabeth—and in that moment he loved Helene so strongly that he wanted to undo his danger to her, undo his journey to bring her here from Germany, undo his marriage to her.
“Tell me,” she said once more, already deciding that if his silence was all he could give her, she would find a way to live with that too. Already, she felt stronger. Strong enough to step away from him and walk to the window. It was snowing. Large weightless flakes dissolved as they grazed the lake. Melted before they could stick to the roofs and streets below.
But then he answered. “Lenchen, you—” And stopped.
“What?” she asked. “What is it?”
He knew he could not say aloud what he was thinking. “You should have never married me, Lenchen” Instead, he told her, “You just take what you want,” startled by the anger in his own voice.
She spun to face him. “And why not?” she challenged him.
How he loved her feistiness. But just as he was about to tell her that, she interrupted.
“If taking what I want means I’ll have this child, then I’m glad I did.”
“Even if it kills you?” And he was back in the cemetery again, on his way to the Brook-that-finishes-grieving. A strong water smell comes at him, envelops him. It is a smell that, if you let it, will drown out everything inside your soul. And as that coolness spins around him, it clothes him. Pulls him toward the currents of the brook.
“Don’t worry so much.”
“How can I not?”
“Because I’ll be here,” she said fiercely. “I promise you that.”
“There is no way a woman can promise something like that. Any woman.”
That afternoon, the snow grew heavier, and a loud wind rose up and tried to push you back into your house if you were foolish enough to leave it. Stefan insisted on making his way to his restaurant, though no one came to eat the food he prepared, not even his employees. For three days and nights the storm lasted: it destroyed several sheds and barns, tore shingles from some of the roofs, and swept over a hundred chickens into the grainy air, carrying them away as though they were dry leaves. Six feet of snow covered the town of Winnipesaukee, and the day it stopped snowing, icy rain glazed all surfaces. Under the weight of snow and ice, trees groaned: some split as if chosen by lightning or fell, smashing fences and windows; most yielded at least a branch, a crown. While Stefan’s restaurant had four broken windows, his apartment building was one of the few houses that didn’t suffer any damage. It didn’t surprise the people of Winnipesaukee—it only made the Wasserburg stand out even more, overshadowing their town, its reflection biting into the lake further than anything they had built.
During Helene’s pregnancy Stefan was cautious with her, formal almost, and she’d find him looking at her as if bracing himself for her death. I’ll be here, she reminded herself. Nights when he had trouble sleeping he’d watch her sleep. Whenever she rolled over, she’d automatically reach for her hair in back of her neck and—without waking herself—hold it in one hand until she’d settle herself back on the pillow.
Other nights it was Helene who would lie next to him long after he was asleep. She would hear his children’s breathing like a heartbeat, waiting, tugging at her, invoking their mothers who had died giving birth, and felt a slow dread in her limbs. More than ever before she thought about Elizabeth and Sara. If she saw Miss Garland by the mailboxes or in the drying room, she kept her talking, hoping she’d start reminiscing about Stefan’s first two wives. After all, Miss Garland had been a grown woman when Elizabeth and Sara were born: she’d seen them at mass every week; had watched them get married; had gone to their funerals.
Very quickly, Miss Garland grasped how she could befriend the third Mrs. Blau. Wishing she had observed Elizabeth and Sara closer, she sieved her memories, but what she recalled couldn’t fill more than a few conversations. And so it was only natural to speculate: that woman by the lake with the red hat and the braid—she could have been Sara … quite likely had been Sara the first summer of her marriage to Stefan Blau. From there a tale would ripen about the summer Sara Blau had ordered that outrageous red hat from Concord. Images of Miss Garland’s childhood would blend with glimpses she’d had of Elizabeth and Sara as girls: that infection in her leg from a dog bite now became Sara’s; the teacher who’d ridiculed Miss Garland for not reading faster was reprimanded by Elizabeth’s father; Miss Garland’s yearning for friends was transformed into a large birthday celebration on Sara’s fifth birthday … so that, gradually, Helene was left with an impression of her two predecessors that felt oddly out of focus as if they had lived decades before their time.
She tried not to worry when Leo wrote that Gertrud was pregnant too. He sounded so hopeful: “She is calmer now. Happier.” His leg was healing. Slowly. “But at least I’ll be able to walk without crutches once the baby is here. Otherwise it would be difficult to carry it.” Their letters kept crossing, filled with anticipation of the babies—Gertrud’s to be born in July, Helene’s a month later—and with renewed plans for a visit. “Once the war is over.”
Once the war is over…
Quite a few of their letters ended that way.
Already, she could picture the infants side by side, strong-jawed and fair-skinned, with the long legs and high span of forehead from the Montag side of their families. When she felt the first hesitant movements within her, she wanted to believe that—despite Stefan’s resistance—the child would deepen her union with him. Everything around her pleased her: the echo of the tenants’ voices in the lobby; the taste of maple syrup poured on snow; the scent of fresh pillowcases as she settled into sleep.
Maternity corsets were a discovery: they made it easier to breathe than regular corsets since they were only lightly boned. Letting out their stretchable lacers in front and back, Helene wore them as loosely as she could, just enough to define her, not hold her in. She bought yards of gray broadcloth, blue silk, white linen. Chose collars of batiste and lace. Hired Mrs. Teichman to come to the apartment twice a week, not just Wednesday but also on Friday, which was Pearl’s regular day with the seamstress, to sew dresses with adjustable waists and longer belts, skirts with extra pleats held in place by snaps that Helene would gradually undo as the pregnancy progressed.
Evenings, when the bedsheet that Mrs. Teichman had spread on the floor was cluttered with scraps and pins, she’d scoop it up, tie the ends together, and carry it away. It would always myst
ify Tobias how, when Mrs. Teichman returned, that same sheet would be folded inside her flowered suitcase—small and tidy—as if it had shaken itself out while she slept. He liked the seamstress, not only because his family got to eat in the kitchen while she scattered patterns and fabrics and scissors and buttons all over the dining room, but also because meals were special on days she was there. Since she was in demand and enjoyed gossip as well as food, some of her customers in the Wasserburg competed with each other, courting her by offering her the best, hoping she’d tell their neighbors how well she’d been treated. It was known that Mrs. Evans served expensive food but only in small portions. And that Mrs. Clarke fed the seamstress’ leftovers to her husband the following day.
What Tobias liked most about the seamstress was that she raised flesh-eating plants. But his stepmother didn’t share his fascination for Mrs. Teichman’s stories of feeding spiders and flies to her plants, and she got upset when the seamstress gave Tobias two of her plants. They were much smaller than both Helene and Tobias had imagined them, and it was their harmless size—rather than his insistence—that persuaded her to let him keep them.
Late one morning, while Helene was stirring a few grains of sugar and half a cup of white wine into the sour-sweet gravy for Sauerbraten, a dull ache pulled at her insides as if they’d suddenly liquified and were about to pour from her. With a cry, she sank to her knees, already grieving the loss of her child. Cold sweat slicked her back, her breasts. She shivered as darkness spun through her, around her. Held herself hard with her arms around her massive belly. And lived a lifetime of being a childless woman, the four of them around the table … she and Stefan with Greta and Tobias … then the children growing… leaving her to stand next to Stefan at their weddings, a barren woman, useless to Stefan because the children he married her for no longer need her. As darkness and pain coursed through her, she feared she didn’t deserve a child because she hadn’t loved the children of the dead mothers enough; and from that fear rose a sudden and vicious envy of Gertrud who would have a child despite her craziness. No. I’d be the better mother. More stable and loving. And it was then that she offered Gertrud’s child up for hers—take hers but let mine live—an offering that came at her out of the darkness and thrust her from that darkness back into her kitchen where Greta crouched next to her on the floor, small face pressed against Helene’s belly; and as Helene felt her stepdaughter’s murmur pass through her flesh, the child within her solidified once more, took shape, and murmured back to Greta. Years later, when Helene would see the two children play together, she’d sometimes be reminded of the first moment they’d been linked like this, with her on the black-and-white tiled floor, a dusting of flour on her apron from the dumplings, enveloped by the sour yet sweet scent of the roast.