Mary came into the bedroom with mugs of tea and pulled a chair right next to the bed. She told Anna she was there for her. They could talk, or not talk. Mary would listen or they could just share silence. “Whatever you need, Anna.”
Anna lay quietly for several minutes and listened as Mary made neutral, inconsequential conversation about Tim and the kids. She mentioned that she talked to Nancy, who sent love and wanted Mary to let Anna know that if there was anything she needed, she shouldn’t hesitate to contact her. Anna said thank you; Mary said she’d pass it along. The conversation idled.
“Mary, what’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?”
Mary set her mug on the nightstand and put her elbows on her knees and her chin in her palms like a young girl might and thought for a moment. “I don’t know. I’ve always tried to be respectable. I’m boring like that, I guess,” she dismissed herself.
“No, Mary, you’re good like that.”
Mary blushed. Anna had embarrassed her. “Let me think. Maybe it was the time I …” Mary stopped and rearranged herself in the chair. “Oh, Anna, I don’t want to say! Why do you want to know?”
“It will make me feel better.”
Mary didn’t understand what she meant but did not press her to explain. “Okay, Anna. You want to know? I’ll tell you. But it’s a secret—really, please—you can’t tell anyone.” Anna nodded. “In high school I set fire to the shed behind my volleyball coach’s house.”
“Mary!” Anna didn’t know whether to be impressed or appalled.
Mary backtracked. “It wasn’t just me. The whole team. We all set it on fire. And it was an old, dilapidated shed to begin with, so …”
Anna was dumbstruck. “Why?”
Mary sighed. “The girls on the team, most of us, we’d been very, very mean to this other girl. Absolutely cruel. We spread rumors about her, we let the air out of her bicycle tires, we told her a boy she had a crush on wanted to date her when he didn’t, we cut her hair …”
“You cut her hair?”
Mary nodded shamefully. “Anna, we were awful. But we were trying to be. We wanted to make her miserable. She quit the team. She transferred schools, actually.”
“But why did you do this?”
Mary shrugged. “It was just one of those high school girl decisions that got made randomly and early on. I didn’t make it. I can’t even say I hated her.” Mary hung her head. Anna could tell she’d felt bad about this for years. “I honestly can’t tell you how it happened that she became our enemy.”
“But the shed?”
“Oh. Our coach found out and made us forfeit the season. It ruined our record. We were angry. So one night we snuck onto her property. One girl had the gas can, another had some newspaper. I struck a match and set the whole thing going. Then we ran.”
“And you didn’t get caught? Surely she suspected you …”
Mary shook her head. “We covered our tracks. And we kept our mouths shut. We couldn’t be charged on suspicion alone. There wasn’t any proof.” Anna nodded. “So that’s it. The worst thing I ever did.”
“And you had to think before answering?”
“Well, no. But I try not to dwell on it.”
“What happened after that?”
“Well, after that we got a new volleyball coach. So we got rid of her as well. The next year we won every game we played. Then I graduated.” Mary stopped to think for a second. “Well, maybe that’s the worst thing. Running her off. And that poor girl.” Mary shook her head. “You know I can’t even remember her name.”
“That’s pretty bad.”
“I’ve never told a soul about this, Anna. Not even Tim.”
“Didn’t he go to the same high school?”
Mary nodded her head yes. “Like I said. We didn’t say a word.” Mary exhaled. “We were just so stupid and thoughtless. This girl didn’t deserve the treatment we gave her. And we weren’t terrible ourselves, I don’t think. Just so destructive. One destruction fueled the next one. We weren’t thinking. We should have been. But we weren’t. Can you understand that?”
“Mary, this is all my fault.”
Mary slid to the edge of her chair and reached for Anna’s blanket and smoothed it down and around her body like she did with her children when she tucked them into bed, mothering her. “What is, honey? And of course it isn’t. I’m sure of it.” Anna wasn’t brave enough to continue.
“Anna,” Mary cooed. “You can tell me anything.” Anna believed that yes, she probably could.
But knew without a doubt she wouldn’t.
KARL CAME TO THE house just once after the funeral. He and Bruno and Guido were going to a ZSC Lions game. Bruno wasn’t home from work. Ursula had taken Victor and Polly on a walk. Anna was dressed, but shabbily. Karl knocked a timid knock.
“Hallo, Anna. How are you touching?”
Anna looked both through and past him. He could have guessed how she felt, he didn’t need to ask. But asking was customary. Responding was optional.
“Come in,” Anna said and showed him into the living room. Karl stepped through the hall and into the house. Anna had been watching a game show on television. 5 Gegen 5. Five against five others. It was a Swiss version of the American program Family Feud.
Karl wasn’t sure what to do with his hands, so he pushed them as deeply into his jacket pockets as he could and then looked to Anna for a cue. Anna shrugged and motioned him to a chair as she shuffled back to her seat on the couch. They spent the next five complicated minutes pretending that neither had seen the other naked.
Anna hadn’t turned the TV off. One of the teams was made up of members of a Burgdorf yodeling club and the other a women’s floorball team from Winterthur. The question—asked in Schwiizerdütsch—was, as near as Anna could tell, “Name a favorite ice cream flavor.” The top response, chocolate, had already been given. One of the women on the floorball team answered “Strawberry!” It was second to last on the list. Anna stared at the television with bloodshot eyes and wondered whether pistachio was on the board. It wasn’t.
“You must never, never, never tell Bruno.”
Karl nodded. It was solemn and small. Then the two of them sat in stillness. Outside, the sun set so quickly it was almost audible.
IN THE BACK OF her notebook, Anna kept a running list of potentially useful German phrases. Mum’s the word! A thousand thanks! Don’t mention it! Ah, but there’s a catch. No ifs, ands, or buts! Ready, set, GO! Good things come in threes! When in Rome! Do you have a toothpick? An eye for an eye. By the skin of my teeth. Where is the drugstore? Where are the trains? How are you doing? I’m doing well! I’m great! I’m pretty good! I’m okay. I’m miserable. I am sick. I need help.
IN A SESSION BEFORE Charles’s death, Doktor Messerli attempted to instruct Anna in the difference between a reason and an excuse. She split these hairs in an Anna-like way.
“I suppose,” Anna conceded dully. She wasn’t exactly listening.
The Doktor frowned but pressed ahead to make her point. “You’re unhappy? Fine. You have grounds for occasional sorrow. Swiss customs still elude you. Yours is a difficult marriage—all marriages are difficult, Anna, even the good ones—and you have few friends and no pastimes. Your children are young. They’re demanding. All of it is difficult. But,” Doktor Messerli continued, “for every reason you present to justify your sadness, you offer a tandem excuse that serves no purpose other than to prolong your misery. ‘I cannot change the intractable Swiss,’ you whine. ‘There’s nothing I can do to make Bruno more attentive’—Anna, have you tried just simply asking him for more attention?—‘I am too shy to make friends,’ ‘Taking care of an infant requires all the energy I have.’ There’s nothing you can do to change your life? That’s the biggest excuse of all.” Anna couldn’t disagree.
Doktor Messerli softened. “Let’s work on this, Anna. Just this. That will be enough. You move like a refugee in a war ghetto when, truly, you have every Allied power at your command. There is
no reason to live like this.” Anna nodded. There wasn’t. “A successful life. Anna. I want you to succeed.”
In Anna’s half-attentive state she heard “secede.”
21
POLLY JEAN’S FIRST BIRTHDAY FELL ON NOVEMBER 29, A Thursday. Anna had no interest in celebrating it. All motions toward merriment seemed obscene. They’d had small fêtes on the occasions of the boys’ first birthdays. Simple dinners, then cake with family. It was the cake that Anna cared about. It was tradition: the birthday child, king of his high chair, his hands elbow deep in a cake he didn’t have to share with anyone, icing in his hair, crumbs up his nose, and Anna taking pictures. That’s what she was ultimately after, the pictures. Bruno found the custom ridiculous. It’s messy and a waste of cake, he said. Nevertheless somewhere in the attic was a photo album no one looked at anymore and inside it, snapshots of each of the boys, their entire faces smeared black with chocolate frosting.
It was Ursula who came to Anna a week before Polly’s birthday. She’d be happy to bake the cake, she said, and volunteered to have the party at her house. It was a warmhearted offer. Anna’s face collapsed under the sympathy of Ursula’s suggestion, but she said nothing. Ursula backed quietly out of the room and left Anna alone for the rest of the afternoon.
Ursula, like Bruno, took a sensible approach to grief. She threw herself into knitting and volunteered on a children’s clothing drive with the Frauenverein and once a week, she met with the same women in the Kirchgemeindehaus to work on other projects, some of them charitable, others creative like the following week’s workshop on Advent crafts that Ursula was planning to attend. And every day, Ursula walked over to Rosenweg to tend to Polly Jean. During this time she set her usual impatience with her daughter-in-law aside and looked for practical ways to help Anna get through the day. Ursula cooked most of the family’s dinners and did the greater part of the marketing and housework. She could offer no other comfort. She’d never been affectionate with Anna. To be familiar and effusive now would seem peculiar and forced.
The subject of Polly Jean’s birthday was approached again that evening, this time by Bruno. He was gentle. He spoke gingerly. He had gone out of his way the last weeks to treat Anna with exceptional compassion. “Don’t you want to take a picture of Polly eating her cake? Come on, Anna. If you don’t take a picture you will wish you had. You have pictures of the boys.” He hadn’t needed to remind her. Anna started crying and Bruno couldn’t find a single word of consolation, though he tried many. He sighed as he stood and said to the wall that he was going upstairs to check on Victor. And then he did.
STEPHEN’S BIRTHDAY WAS THE first day of May. He’d turned forty-two the month after he left Switzerland. Anna had, on that day and this year on his birthday as well, gone into the city, to Neumarkt, and stationed herself at a table in the Kantorei where they had gone for drinks on the day that they met. Both times she had gone with the sole intent to cry, though on neither occasion could she find the tears. In each instance, she started at the beginning and told herself the entire story. It had seemed an obligatory, if self-spiteful, ritual.
Was it really love? she’d ask herself. Was it close to love? Did it live in love’s neighborhood?
Of course it was love. A version of love. With Polly Jean to prove it.
ANNA HAD SEEN DOKTOR Messerli only once since Charles’s death. The Doktor spoke much slower than she usually did, and with softer intonations. Her sentences had intermissions. She asked the requisite questions: How are you holding up, Anna? What are you doing to honor your son’s memory? How are you interacting with your family? How are you taking care of yourself? Are you taking care of yourself? She gave Anna another prescription for tranquilizers. Anna had never bothered to fill the first.
“Where do they go, the dead?”
Doktor Messerli answered honestly. “I don’t know.” They’d talked around this subject before.
“What do they do?”
“I don’t know that either, Anna.”
“Will I see him again?” Anna spoke with desperation.
“I hope so,” the Doktor said. She meant it.
IN THE END, THERE was nothing to do about Polly Jean’s party but have it. Ursula and Bruno insisted. Anna, limp as cotton cloth, didn’t have the strength to fight them. They’d planned nothing extravagant—a supper with the family at Ursula’s house. That was all.
Daniela would come from Mumpf and Mary would join them as well. Tim had a game and Max and Alexis would stay with the wife of a teammate. Max hadn’t returned to Dietlikon since the accident. It was best. He didn’t understand that dead meant forever.
Ursula made split-pea soup. Anna managed a few bites. This earned approving nods from Bruno and Mary, which Anna pretended not to notice. Ursula had also baked two white cakes, each covered in pale pink frosting: one for the family to enjoy, and a small one intended for Polly Jean alone. Polly Jean threw herself into its deconstruction, squealing with glee. There were crumbs in her hair and clumps of frosting in her eyelashes. Bruno took the photos. Polly Jean’s laugh made everyone else laugh. Even Anna smiled, though it shamed her and she tried to stifle it. Mary put her arm around her and in a whisper told her that there was never any shame in joy. “If Charles were here, Anna, he’d be laughing too.” Until that point every mention made of Charles had sent Anna spinning into sobs. But the tone of Mary’s voice was yielding and her genuine belief that Charles, wherever he was, was fine and without a doubt happy and safe—yes, Anna, in Heaven!—pulled Anna away from the company of her despairs. Mary was sure. “Yes, Anna. I’m positive. Your son is well,” she said. Mary had never given Anna any reason to distrust her. So in that moment, with her family around her, Anna tried to imagine Heaven, and Charles in it. Where are you? What are you doing? Is this possible? Oh Schatz, my love! Can you see me? I miss you! I love you most of all!
The attempt, to Anna’s astonishment, succeeded. There were no harps or halos. There wasn’t a gate. In this Heaven there wasn’t even God. And it wasn’t so much a place as it was a dimension that existed just beyond the tangible three of the physical world and outside the immaterial chronology of the fourth. It was only a glimpse, and a quick flicker of a glimpse at that—but what she saw was a vicinity near to her own (nearer in fact than she would have expected) where time and physical form no longer mattered, if ever they mattered to begin with, and there, in that realm, was Charles. He was faceless and formless and yet altogether whole. The universal benevolence Doktor Messerli believed in cupped the soul of her son in its palm. The palm was warm. The warmth was real. This, she could accept. She could live with this.
Anna began to feel some of the hard, black fog lift from her shoulders and with Mary’s permission, she embraced the feeling. It won’t be bad forever, Anna soothed herself. I don’t need to feel bad forever. She was hopeful but wary. A mood is a fickle thing. As quickly as it comes it can depart.
Polly Jean was a glorious mess. There was even cake in her ears. When enough became enough, Anna made a motion to pick her up and take her away, but Ursula intervened. “I’ll bathe her. Stay with your guest.”
Oh, Anna said, which she hoped translated to Thank you.
Victor ate two pieces of cake then ran off to watch television in Ursula’s living room. He, too, seemed lighter. Bruno, Mary, and Daniela drank coffee and chatted. All interaction hedged against levity. Anna felt better, this was evident. Still, everyone remained cautious in his or her speech. No one wanted her disposition to slip.
The conversation began in earnest innocence. Mary had mentioned how much like Bruno Victor looked. “It’s his eyes and nose. And the shape of his face. A Xerox, Bruno!” Mary laughed at this clever-only-to-herself remark. Anna nodded from the other side of her coffee cup as she sipped. Victor did look exactly like Bruno. He acts just like him too. On his best days and his worst. “Max and Tim look nothing alike. Well, maybe in the eyes. A little. Everyone says he favors my side of the family. But oh—listen to this. So my great-gr
andfather Alexander had two children …” Mary, who had already been talking in circles, launched into an even more circuitous story about Alexander’s fraternal twin sister and what Alexis looked like as a baby. Anna wasn’t listening. She was looping the memory of Charles’s first birthday. It was a balmy mid-April day and the whole family and all the neighbors sat under the apple trees and watched as Charles took his first unaided steps. He toddled three feet and then collapsed on the grass in giggles. It was a good day.
Mary continued. Bruno listened closely, or pretended to. He smiled at the right pauses and made appropriate comments when the moments allowed and held an interested expression as Mary rattled on about babies and family resemblances. Mary had made no secret that she longed for a third child. When Anna asked why, Mary responded by admitting that having a baby would give her something to do. Anna laughed until she realized Mary wasn’t kidding. At the time Anna had thought to herself she’d do better with a lover, they were less trouble.
“… anyway, it was so strong a resemblance that people just assumed it was her baby! So”—Mary punctuated the end of her convolution by reaching for her coffee cup—“where’d that pitch-black hair and sweet little nose come from? She really doesn’t look like either of you.” Mary glanced at both Anna and Bruno. Neither spoke for a moment.
Anna froze. She’d never had to answer this question, though for a year now she’d rehearsed several responses. That’s what I looked like as a baby, my hair only lightened when I went to school. My mother’s mother was Italian (or Spanish). Well, when both mother and father carry recessive genetic traits, there’s a high probability that what’s dormant in the parents will become dominant in the offspring. You see, the nineteenth-century Augustinian friar Gregor Mendel hybridized some pea plants … These and more, Anna had practiced. But she hadn’t practiced them enough because when she most needed them, none came to mind. Jesus. I can’t remember anything. Anna bought time by shoveling a very large forkful of cake into her mouth. She avoided speaking aloud by pretending she couldn’t.
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