by Ursula Hegi
“What are we doing on the floor?” Trying to smile at Greta and feeling her lips tremble in that effort, she raised herself, one hand on her belly, which felt firm now.
Though she would not forget the pain, she would forget its severity until two months later when she’d be taken with a sequence of those very same spasms, leaving her chilled and sweaty—that too was familiar; that too—on the hottest day of July, no wind at all, the lake sullen beneath the blinding sky; and when Dr. Miles was called to the house—a month early for the baby to arrive—the people of Winnipesaukee lit candles for the third wife of Stefan Blau who, as she pushed her child into the world, suddenly wanted to hold back, keep it sheltered because she was terrified it would not be welcomed. Not by its father. Not by this country.
But the doctor’s palms pressed down on her belly. “Don’t stop now.”
She set her teeth.
“You have to keep pushing, Mrs. Blau.”
She had felt the townspeople’s distrust ever since May when a German submarine had sunk the Lusitania, killing more than a thousand people. Stefan said she was too sensitive, but she could feel it like a shift in temperature. That sudden tightness in faces when she entered a store. Even in church. Maybe because to the townspeople she seemed more German than her husband, a more recent arrival with a stronger accent than his.
“Mrs. Blau? Do you hear me?”
Her child would never be as American as the children of Stefan’s American wives who linked him to this town. Still, by birth her child would be American. A different nationality than hers. No—
“You must push.”
For her child … for her child she would do it, become American. As soon as she could.
“Push. Now—”
Then, as all sky pressed down on the lake and squeezed the sun aside, squeezed it through the lace curtains Mrs. Teichman had sewn, squeezed it so hard that the sun turned transparent, Helene could no longer keep from bearing down, and he burst from her, the child, a boy, and as she touched him, cautiously at first and then ripping him into her arms, it was with the certainty that she and her son were alone in an inhospitable country.
Stefan came to her bed.
Bent to kiss her forehead.
Asked to hold the child.
“The child you didn’t want?”
“Lenchen … don’t say that.”
“It’s the truth.” Without blinking, she looked at this man who had put her name on the deeds for his house and restaurant to force the heavens to keep her alive, to pacify her for not having a child. Tokens of his belief Trades I never wanted. But she had her child now. Had it all—child and house and restaurant.
He reached for her son, and she let him. Watched him hold her son—awkward about it, so awkward—and found him useless. It was as though all the men of all her fantasies had fathered this child, had given her the brazenness to seize her husband, use him to get this child who was hers alone, thrust into life through her will.
The same month Helene gave birth to Robert, Leo became the father of a girl, Trudi. When he sent a photo of Trudi with a letter that both she and Gertrud were doing well, the little girl’s features looked so much like Robert’s that they could have been twins.
“Except that her head seems a bit larger,” Helene told Stefan.
He studied the picture. “Probably because of how the light fell when she was photographed in her cradle,” he suggested.
“If we didn’t have a child the same age, we wouldn’t notice the difference.”
To his father, Robert was merely one more child in the family, while Helene felt a bond to her son that stunned her, a bond that—in comparison—made marriage seem weak, her relationship with her brother insignificant. Robert absorbed her thoughts, her hours. Though she continued to take the best care of Stefan’s American children, it was her son’s quiet laugh that enchanted her, the tug of his hunger that filled her with awe as he drew his nourishment from her, his gaze focused on her. Only her.
After years of longing for Stefan, it amazed her to have her forceful love returned to her in every blink of her son’s eyes, every movement. As her tenderness and passion shifted and settled on her son, Stefan felt no longer burdened by her unspoken love, and the marriage found a new symmetry in respect and shared accomplishments.
Her son was so much easier to raise than Tobias: content where Tobias had been fretful; affectionate where Tobias had been rigid.
Her son rarely cried and kept food down instead of spitting it up.
Her son let her calm him immediately with German words and songs if he was fussy.
Still, she felt overwhelmed by remorse that she never had enough time for him. Though one of the maids was usually available to help with housework, the American children wanted Helene to be the one who bathed them, fed them, pushed their swing. Again and again they pulled her away from Robert or interrupted the nursing by crowding into her lap. And because it made her feel stingy to be giving most of her love to her own son, she didn’t let herself pick him up every time he cried, though she wanted to and ached with each unanswered scream. Besides, as a girl she’d been taught by her mother and neighbors that it was important to be strict with babies right from the beginning. As soon as he could sit, she began to toilet train him by propping him on the Töpfchen—potty—holding him like that on her lap while she nursed him, just as her mother had trained her and Leo. It wouldn’t be until her grandchildren were born that she would regret all those times she hadn’t soothed Robert—such a waste, that insistence on strictness, a waste for her son and herself—and she would become more spontaneous as a grandparent than she’d ever been as a mother.
If the Blaus had known how much of their private lives were absorbed into the town lore, they would have been mortified: the people of Winnipesaukee understood that Stefan loved the Wasserburg more than his third wife and his children; they felt uncomfortable with his Germanness whenever they read about the war, but they also noted how he helped the poor in town with baskets of food; they admired his wife’s effort to be a mother to Greta and Tobias and forgave her for loving her own son best; but they did not approve of her friendship with Pearl Bloom, a woman who’d sung on ocean liners and still had a way of gazing past them as if seeking some foreign horizon.
Helene didn’t hear about the problems from Leo but from Stefan’s mother, who confided that Gertrud was acting crazy around the baby. “She says something’s not right with the child. She hasn’t touched Trudi at all since she was born. If it weren’t for neighbors like us, Trudi would have starved by now. Promise not to tell Leo that you know,” she wrote. “He’s doing what he can—given that he is a man…. Twice already he has found the child dirty and crying. While all Gertrud did was sit on the bed in her nightgown, hands over her ears.” She wrote how Ilse Abramowitz had tacked up a list to the door of the Weilers’ grocery store, and eleven women had signed up so far—women from the Catholic church and the Temple and the Protestant church who usually did not call on each other—to take Trudi home for a day or a few hours to tend to her along with their own children. With so many of the men still fighting in the war, the women had additional responsibilities; and still they found more time for each other because there were no men to feed, to clean for, to please. They would take turns sitting with Gertrud in her bedroom above the pay-library to make sure she didn’t run away. Because that’s what she’d started doing. “And without her clothes,” Stefan’s mother wrote. “It’s a disgrace.”
“But what’s wrong with the baby?” Helene wrote back. She wished she could ask Leo directly. Knowing more than he’d chosen to tell her made her letters to him awkward until, finally, he acknowledged what was happening with his wife.
“But it has nothing to do with Trudi,” he insisted, “regardless of what others may have told you. There’s always been something about Gertrud I haven’t understood … something that gets twisted underneath her thinking … Maybe it’s my fault that now it’s out there, making he
r act like this. Some people say it’s because of the baby. But Trudi is the most perfect child you’ve ever seen. I keep her with me in the library while I work. Her eyes, Helene, so intelligent, so wise. Like yours. And she has such strong hands. The way she grips my fingers … It’s just that she won’t be growing quite as much as other children.”
“The girl is a Zwerg—dwarf,” Stefan’s mother wrote. “That’s what Frau Doktor Rosen told Leo. But he doesn’t want to hear.”
Helene felt ashamed for being grateful that it was not her child who was marked like that. Guilty at having offered Gertrud’s child up in turn for not miscarrying hers. But then there was Robert. And how could she ever regret having kept him alive? Still—it was because of her that Trudi was a Zwerg. Of that she felt certain.
In the meantime, Frau Weiler kept updating the volunteers’ list, encouraging other customers to sign up if there ever was a lull. It gave some women in Burgdorf a chance to feel superior to Gertrud Montag. Virtuous. As tender as they were with the child, that scornful were they of a mother who didn’t have it in her to touch her own daughter. Although they brought Gertrud soup and flowers, washed her linens and ironed her husband’s shirts, fed Trudi and curled the ends of her fine hair around their fingers, they would never accept Gertrud back as being one of them because she had broken the natural law of being a mother, had challenged other mothers by magnifying that moment every one of them had felt, a moment when you’re so depleted by a child’s needs that you can’t bear to go near it, a moment you forget instantly because it would shame you to remember; and you’ll never understand that other mothers have felt it too because none of you will speak of it.
But Gertrud Montag embodied that aberration.
Gertrud Montag had become what you feared you might be capable of yourself.
“Leo looks sad and confused,” Ilse Abramowitz wrote to Helene. “He’s too thin. And he’s losing customers because he has to lock up the library to find Gertrud whenever she runs off. Yesterday she was hiding in the cemetery. A few days ago by the river.”
Even Margret sent more than her usual few lines: “If you were still here, Helene, you’d be such a support to your brother.”
With strings of letters she formed a weave to her old neighborhood. With threads of worry and hope she nested herself in her brother’s family. Sometimes she felt angry at her sister-in-law. But mostly she felt pity for her. I warned him. At least I tried. But Leo had reminded her, “None of us can know for sure if someone else is right for us.” And then he’d said Gertrud felt like a sister to him. Sister? Is that how you are with her at night? Is that what is taking Gertrud across the frail edge? Like a sister… It’s the last thing Yd want from a husband. And yet how much better is it with me and Stefan?
Trudi was so much a part of Helene’s awareness that even Robert’s steady growth served as a constant reproach that Trudi was growing too slowly. My wickedness. My sin.
Occasionally Leo’s letters were hopeful. “Gertrud fed Trudi for the first time. … Yesterday she sang to her.”
But the following letter showed how concerned he was about her. “She is getting too excitable again. Wants to carry Trudi around with her wherever she goes. I have to watch her constantly. She’d never want to hurt Trudi. Still…”
Helene spoke only German to Robert, taught him to call her Mutti, his father Vati, and as he learned both tongues as if they were one, he switched between them with ease depending on who was talking to him, and without awareness that he was even using two different languages.
“Gertrud gets impatient for Trudi to wake up because she wants to play with her,” Leo wrote. “She cries when I lock her up in the sewing room. Calls me her jailer. God, how I hate to do that to her. But it’s better to have her home than sending her to the asylum.”
When he finally agreed with the doctor that it would be best to send his wife to the asylum in Grafenberg, it was with great reluctance. “Only for a few weeks. Frau Doktor Rosen says it will help her, settle her.”
And then there were no more letters because Congress declared war against Germany, and Helene didn’t even know if Gertrud was still in the asylum or back home, where her craziness might endanger her family as much as the craziness of war.
Tobias’ friendship with the Wilsons’ nephew puzzled the tenants because Danny was ten years older than Tobias. Tidy and strong with a small frame, Danny Wilson resembled his Aunt Irene as if, by all rights, he should have come from her side of the family instead of her husband’s. Though Danny could be quite moody, rude even, he wasn’t that way around Tobias, but rather patient despite the boy’s incessant questions.
Tobias would follow Danny around whenever he visited his aunt and uncle. Though Danny would pretend to look pestered, Helene could tell he was pleased by Tobias’ attention, and she figured he tolerated Tobias for the simple reason that the boy was so hard to like. Danny reminded Helene of young men she’d seen in Germany, hardworking young men who were fiercely handsome for a brief time, but whose jaws would settle and fall before they were forty, whose long, jaunty necks would turn stringy.
“You’re the best friend I got in the building,” Tobias told Danny the afternoon he moved in for good with his Aunt Irene and Uncle Homer.
After unpacking his boxes, Danny had come outside to sit on the front steps of the Wasserburg, where he was drawing circles and squares on the bottom step with a chunk of white he had in his fist.
“What’s that?” Tobias asked.
“Chalk. My very own chalk, okay? And you should get friends your own age.”
“Well, I don’t, and that’s that. It’s because they’re very, very immature.”
“Is that so?” Danny sat hunched over, the collar of his black jacket drawn up.
Tobias nodded. He wished his hair were thick and short like Danny’s, cropped close instead of his own fly-away strands. But even though he didn’t like his hair, he liked being smart. Much smarter for sure than Greta who got bad grades in school because she daydreamed and now had a tutor twice a week. Smarter too than Robert. Twice as smart because of Agnes. Even though he was only one. With Agnes he was half of one. Which meant two. He’d known that for as long as he’d known anything—someone like me; almost like me—but it wasn’t until one day in church that he’d understood what he already knew because the priest was talking about the animals on Noah’s ark. Two of one kind. Meaning each of them was half of that one. The story of Noah had become Tobias’ favorite because Noah had gathered two zebras and two chickens, two wolves and two elephants, two of each kind. That’s how it was with him and Agnes. Sleeps and dreams, dreams and turns, living for himself and for her. His father said he couldn’t possibly remember Agnes since she’d stopped living an entire month before he was born; but Tobias could feel her living in his blood—a flash of movement, the sound of her voice, the crackle of her hair—Agnes, always one year older than he. Eight years old already.
Tobias pulled on Danny’s sleeve. “My mother is dead too.”
But Danny didn’t answer. He raised his face into the brisk wind that chased gray clouds across the faded sky. His cheeks were pink, the kind of pink you get when you’re cold. But his lips were white.
“Like your mother.”
“Hey, thanks for reminding me.” Danny’s arm slashed a white square around a circle. A circle around that square. Swift lines inward. A collapsing sun.
Tobias didn’t dare tell him that his father didn’t like people drawing on the steps or sidewalk. And even though it would wash away with the next rain, he’d tell the Wilsons to wash it off. But he could tell that Danny wasn’t scared of his father. Because his sun was growing bigger. Growing lightning arrows. Growing clouds.
“She didn’t even die the way she was supposed to,” Danny said, teeth clenched. “You know what she did?”
Tobias nodded. He’d been home when Mrs. Wilson had run up the stairs to the sixth floor—not waiting for the elevator—with the news that Danny was hers now, fin
ally, because his mother had died in a bicycle accident. A soft shoulder of road had given way during rain, and she’d fallen down an embankment, striking her head.
“Got on a stupid bicycle—” The chalk screeched across the step.
“Did you go to your mother’s funeral? I did. I was just born. Actually, I was seven days old and …”
Danny groaned.
“… and Greta’s grandma says I had a tiny black coat. And tiny black shoes. Did you go to your mother’s funeral?”
“You always ask that many questions?”
“Yes.”
Danny flinched as the light in the stained-glass lanterns at the bottom of the front steps came on. “I went. All right? This morning.”
“You get to stay here now.”
“Till I find something better.” Danny glanced up when he heard Tobias cry. “Stop it,” he said as tears ran down the boy’s heart-shaped face—such an ugly child—down the pointy chin, and into the collar of his little tweed jacket. “Hey now, what are you? Two years old?”
Tobias hiccuped and leaned against one of the cold, black railings that ran from the lanterns to the front door.
“I didn’t hear your answer, Mr. Tobias Blau.”