"Donald, please," my aunt said.
"Or Deutsche Werft, which built U-553, the one that sunk the Nicoya off the Gaspe," my uncle said. "And you can't use its goddamn son-of-a-bitch shithole commander's name, Karl Thurmann."
"I understand," Hans said.
"Come to think of it, don't try and get away with 'Rapunzel' or 'Rumpelstiltskin,' either."
Tilda took the Criss Cross set down from a shelf. My aunt washed and racked the dishes, and my uncle went outside to cool down with a cigarette. Tilda got all the little wooden Criss Cross letters lined up neatly. "You always have exactly ten letters to work with, Hans," she said.
"So, 'Rumpelstiltskin' wouldn't be allowed anyway," Hans said.
"Each turn, you spell out a word, then choose replacement letters. We play until all the letters run out," Tilda said, unfolding the board on the dining room table. Donald stepped back into the house. He and Constance said good night and repaired to their bedroom. Tilda, Hans and I sat at the table.
Tilda went through the few remaining rules, ending with "—each letter is worth a different amount. In the end, the player who's got the most points wins the game."
"It's mainly a spelling competition, I think," Hans said.
"Look at their values, Hans. Short words can be worth quite a lot," Tilda said. "The main thing is, you have to join your word to someone else's word." She formed a cross with her two pointer fingers. "Like an intersection on the road. The words crisscross."
"I'm prepared to start," Hans said.
We played for an hour, then we had seconds of ice cream. Tilda made coffee, which we took into the parlor. Back at the table, it was Hans's turn. He set down "ravishing."
"That's a lot of points," Tilda said.
"Do you know this word, Wyatt? Ravishing?" Hans asked. "Its definition is—well, basically, it's Tilda. Don't you agree?"
Quitting the game, I left the house and walked to the wharf. Stood there hangdog, only in shirtsleeves. Roiled up. See, what had caught up with me, standing there in the cold fog of the wharf, was the stark belief that I was illiterate in matters of the heart. That is, I felt Tilda was ravishing, but I hadn't known to use that perfect word. I stood there for quite a while. Finally, my uncle's truck appeared and I walked toward it. My aunt was on the passenger side. They were both dressed properly for the weather. "You'll catch your death, Wyatt," my uncle said. I got in beside my aunt in the front seat. But my uncle opened his door and got out. He walked to the end of the dock and smoked a cigarette.
"Tilda said you might be down here," my aunt said.
"Where's Tilda now?" I said.
"She's not at home."
"I've a mind to go over to the bakery."
"And do what? You'd get to the bakery and do what?"
"Let's just get Uncle Donald and drive back to the house, then."
"Donald won't smoke the whole cigarette, so with what time we've got, please listen."
"All right."
"First off, I took to heart your undignified behavior, Wyatt. I mean at supper, and later on when I eavesdropped on your game of Criss Cross. And just so you know, Donald and I are quite aware of Tilda and this German boy's fawning over each other right from the start. Make no mistake about it, Hans Mohring has a genuine courtship in progress."
"I know that," I said.
"We need to keep our distance from it, Donald and I. Tilda's allowed her young woman's discoveries, eh? On the other hand, and Lord knows I'm no great student of people, but when you and Tilda are in the same room, you should just see how you light up. And how often in a lifetime do you have to hear 'All's fair in love and war' for it to become useful?"
"Really, you see me as being in love with Tilda, Aunt Constance?"
"Yes I do. Yes I do. How do you see yourself, Wyatt?"
"The same way."
"Wyatt, here's my two cents' worth of advice: the longer Hans Mohring lives over the bakery, the sooner you might declare yourself to Tilda. Give yourself a fighting chance, young man!"
"But—and I don't quite know how to ask—is there anything in the Bible, or in Nova Scotia law, that speaks to cousins?"
"Tilda's merely called your cousin, but her being adopted, she's not blood relations, family-tree-wise she's not. I consulted Reverend Witt, and he said—grudgingly, but still—he said even the church recognizes this. Besides, Donald and I might as well be from Mongolia, considering how little Tilda resembles us. Hard not to notice, our features are a world apart."
"I see you've put a lot of thought into this, Aunt Constance."
"What I mean is, ethically, if you have feelings for Tilda, there's leeway. I hadn't felt the urgency to discuss this with you before, Wyatt. Neither had Donald, out in the shed. But now there it is."
"Well, thanks for coming out here, Aunt Constance. Some rescue mission."
"With Tilda, you might also try a divination. Some people believe in them. If a divination doesn't work, nothing happens. If it does work, life changes for the better."
"What'd be a proper divination?"
"Start with something simple. Name your bedposts after the one you love."
"Name my bedposts Tilda Hillyer, is that what you're suggesting?"
"I'm suggesting it can't hurt."
When I looked over, I saw my uncle douse his cigarette by holding it above his head and wagging it a few times in the fog-drenched air. He tossed the butt onto the dock, not into the sea. My uncle wasn't much given to superstition, but he'd warned more than once: never sully the sea, or someday it'll come back at you hard, tenfold.
In Tilda's Own Hand
ON INTO AUTUMN OF 1942, there was, to my mind, a nagging sense of life being off kilter. Temperament-wise, my uncle sported a shorter and shorter fuse, and flare-ups, small and not so small, occurred between us at work, yet most of the time I couldn't figure out the provocation. Still, sleds and toboggans somehow got completed, deadlines were met, paperwork got done. There was, however, a new distance between Uncle Donald and me. Hard to say it right, but it seemed as if my uncle's closest human connection was now with the radio. For example —and this was a complete shock to my aunt and me—Donald didn't join us for dinner two, three or four evenings in a row. Some nights he'd come in so late, Constance would already be asleep. He wouldn't bother to heat up his food. Some nights I'd hear the radio and look in on him. He'd have his ear pressed to the speaker like a safecracker at a lock, except of course it was the tuning dial he turned in the tiniest calibrations.
Not wanting to act the lovesick village idiot anymore, especially in front of Tilda, I tried as best I could to avoid her and Hans. For the most part, this simply meant staying close to home. It helped that I was working such long hours, pretty much dawn to dusk, fairly collapsing after supper. What's more, when I listened to the rest of the house from my bed, I no longer heard the murmur of Tilda's reading from The Highland Book of Platitudes or In a German Pension or any other book. And one night, to my disturbing surprise, I realized I wasn't hearing my uncle's gramophone records, either.
I had to face facts: Tilda was in love with Hans. My aunt's phrase, "her young woman's discoveries," had loud nighttime echoes. Yet I never thought I'd see the day when my uncle stopped listening to Beethoven. I'm sure Constance could've told me where Donald's love for this composer had come from, and why it had persisted, but I had failed to ask her. I have to admit, Quartet No. 9 in C Major and Quartet No. 10 in E-flat Major were my favorites, and all the major symphonies. For Aunt Constance, the absence of gramophone music made her feel bereft. Then one night—and I mean at three A.M.—I heard my aunt's voice, louder than I'd ever heard it or could ever have imagined it. This time it had lost all decorum. It was as if she'd hired a total stranger to shout on her behalf: "You are allowing into our house the wrong Germans out of history, Donald! You're letting the wrong ones into our house!"
"What are you trying to say?" my uncle replied.
"I'm saying, listen to all the war bulletins you want to in
your shed. But in the house? Donald, those war broadcasts are all murder, aren't they? All Hitler and death and ships lost at sea. I'm saying Beethoven's not those things."
But my uncle made up his mind differently, and one cold, windy, rainy morning in early October, all of his gramophone records were nowhere to be seen. Not just the Beethoven but his entire collection. "I've looked high and low," my aunt said in great distress. "They're gone." After that, it was exclusively radio programs — standard broadcasts and shortwave—that kept me awake until I couldn't keep my eyes open anymore. Bulletins, updates, casualty tolls, even stories of individual Canadian soldiers. Bleak news, that is, with the occasional reprieve of less bleak news. Static, static, static. My uncle puttering around in the kitchen. My aunt would call him to bed, often with reproach, and he'd respond, "Not yet, there's some news coming in from France," or something along those lines. I'd hear the tea kettle whistling or the coffeepot percolating, the thud of a whiskey bottle set down too hard on the table.
"God forgive me —and keep this to yourself," my aunt said. "Lately it's as if my beloved Donald's become a stranger to me, and we're married thirty-seven years! When I look in on him in the kitchen, often the lights are off. No candles, either. And he's blowing on those glowing radio tubes, when for years Donald has maintained that blowing on those tubes doesn't help the reception one bit."
In the last week of September and up to October 3, my uncle and I completed two sleds and a toboggan. The weather was all lowered clouds, rain threatened, threats realized, the Minas Basin wildly tossing and turning. Here is a sentence from the biographical notes printed on the back of the record album of Beethoven's First and Second symphonies: "During this period he was all too judiciously attended by insomnia." I knew what that meant. And so there we were, Constance, Donald and myself, absent Tilda. No books, no gramophone music. The radio in the shed, the radio on the kitchen table. My uncle listened to the radio in the bedroom too.
At seven A.M., October 5, Donald made a remark about my method of sanding a toboggan plank (it was one of my best skills) that was too critical for me to tolerate, so I drove, three hours earlier than usual, to the bakery to have coffee and a scone. Tilda was there, but not Hans, and I sat with her at a table near the window. "I see you're sitting here alone, without a book to read," I said.
"Hans is upstairs writing his supervising professor a letter," she said. "He keeps tearing it up and starting over. Obviously he hasn't been in classes. He's asking for next semester away from Dalhousie, too. It's called a leave of absence. Problem is, he doesn't want to upset his uncle, whose been so generous. That'll take a separate letter to Denmark. If letters still get there. Hans isn't so sure. He hasn't received one in months."
"And he can't tell this professor the real reason he doesn't want to come back, can he?" I said. "That reason being Tilda Hillyer."
"That's true," Tilda said. "It wouldn't wash."
"Well, if it doesn't work out the way he wants, you could always visit him in Halifax," I said.
"You mean the way we want," Tilda said. "Me and Hans, the way we want it to work out."
"I didn't mean that," I said. "I didn't mean that on purpose."
"Well, you should mean it," she said. "For my sake."
"Nonetheless," I said, "you could visit Halifax."
"Or I could move to Halifax," she said.
Naturally, that little exchange was a far cry from what my aunt had meant by declaring myself to Tilda. Stilted conversation along with no coffee, no scone—that was my breakfast with her. Except that as I was about to leave the bakery, Tilda said, "Wyatt, sit down again, will you?" So of course I sat right down and she cupped my hands in hers. "I need to ask you something. Please try to put aside your feelings toward Hans—or at least try to include my feelings for him—in how you listen to what I've got to say."
"All right, Tilda," I said. "Ask your question."
"Did you know that my father left broken pieces of all his gramophone records on our bed? Right upstairs from where we're sitting now. My own father trespassed in like a burglar or something. It had to be my dad. Nobody else would dare touch those records. Honestly, now, did you know he did that? Were you aware of it? Why would Pop do that? Because it was the most upsetting thing. Hans fixed an inside lock to the door of our rooms, can you imagine?"
"Aunt Constance and me couldn't find the records, Tilda," I said. "But I didn't know what happened to them. And that's God's truth."
"I believe you, Wyatt."
"I know Aunt Constance's been to see you."
"A number of times," Tilda said. "She didn't ask me to move back home. She said she's worried about Dad in all sorts of regards. You know what? Mom asked Cornelia, did my living out of wedlock with Hans above her bakery make her uncomfortable?"
"What'd Cornelia say to that?"
"She said, 'Constance, I lived with my husband Llewyn, rest in peace, two years before we got married. I'm no hypocrite.'"
"Sounds like Cornelia, all right," I said.
"Out of wedlock or no," Tilda said, "I'm getting sick of her sandwiches."
"Yesterday we had stew from the French cookbook," I said. "It was just me and Aunt Constance at table, though. Uncle Donald's appetite, what's left of it, hasn't been kicking in till later in the evening, you might say."
"Well, I'm not going home for supper, Wyatt," Tilda said. "But I am wanting to confide in you, because you're the most dignified man I know. Though not so dignified of late, eh?"
"I wouldn't call me dignified of late, no."
"Can I show you something?"
"All right."
Tilda reached into her Dutch school bag and took out a sheaf of papers held together by a paper clip. She set them in front of me and said, "I wrote this. Well, Hans talked to me and I took dictation. I'm hardly as capable as Lenore Teachout, but I did a pretty good job."
"What is it, anyway?"
"It's Hans's obituary. He provided a lot of facts, and I added some flourishes, you might say. Hans has the original, and he's writing one in German, too. For his parents."
"This kind of gives me the creeps, Tilda," I said. "Why'd Hans want you to write his obituary? He's only twenty years old."
"Twenty-one," Tilda said. "As to your question, maybe the best way to put it is, Hans doesn't take life for granted. Not like many people take it for granted. That's the big lesson out of history he's learned. Don't take any single day for granted. At any rate, it's how he thinks. And it's a way of thinking he's earned, believe me. You read this obituary, you'll understand. He said I could just keep adding to it after we'd set up house and such together, eh? As the years go by."
"Maybe I'll get a coffee now." I poured a cup of coffee from the pot on the electric ring behind the counter and sat down across from Tilda again.
"Wyatt," Tilda said, "I need to ask you a favor."
"Favors aren't easy for you to ask," I said. "That much I still know about you."
"I'd like you to show this obituary to my father."
"Why on earth?"
"Because the U-boats, the radio and everything else have got him halfway off his rocker, that's why," she said. "You're in the house, Wyatt. Don't act like you don't know exactly what I mean. And if Hans Mohring—if. If Hans should become my husband, then Dad's got to try and see him whole-cloth. I think the obituary might help Dad see Hans as someone who's not had an easy time of it. And that he loves me and I love him. Maybe we're both a bit head-over-heels. But so what? Maybe it's laughable, us all smitten. But it's not laughable to us. Anyway, my hope is, this obituary, in his daughter's handwriting, might help convince my dad that Hans is not just a German anybody. Understand, Wyatt?"
"You look like you're going to cry, Tilda," I said. "It's too early in the morning to get so worked up."
"Well, I started getting worked up about eight o'clock last night," she said. "I've been getting steadily more worked up ever since. Just please give this obituary to my father, will you?"
Ma
rlais, I did deliver those pages to my uncle out in his shed, and he did read them, and then he tacked them to the wall along with the newspaper articles. He placed the obituary next in line after the last reported U-boat sinking. Then he went back to applying linseed to a sled. He didn't offer a single comment about Hans Mohring's life. What my uncle did say was "This is one inspiring document Tilda's written up, don't you think?" Later, I sneaked into the shed on my own and retrieved the obituary.
Those pages, in Tilda's own hand, I've kept all these years.
Always Leave a Little Room for a New Purchase
NEXT MORNING, OCTOBER 6, I didn't bother to go to work. Instead, at seven A.M. I went to the bakery, and there sat Tilda again. She looked all haywire, exhausted as I'd ever seen her, I'd say more ravished, just this once, than ravishing. She wore a gray fisherman's sweater, dark loose trousers and galoshes. It was steadily raining, with harder rain in the offing. The moment I joined her at the window-side table she said, "Hans has made an addition to his obituary."
Cornelia was behind the counter. On its shelf, the radio was affected by the storm. There was mostly static, with barely audible passages of music now and then. Yet Cornelia made no effort to find another station. I hoped that I was wrong, but it was almost as if she was resigned to the static itself being the featured program, human expression the interruption. Tilda and I watched her a few moments.
"Being a touch stingy with candy sprinkles on those cupcakes, aren't you, Cornelia?" Tilda said. Cornelia ignored this. Every day after school, children stopped in for cupcakes. One to eat in the bakery, sometimes up to half a dozen to take home. Cornelia couldn't afford to slack off on them. The woodstove had only just begun to provide heat. Tilda and I were drinking coffee and eating toast and jam. "Want to know what he added?" Tilda said.
"I'm all ears."
"That he is survived by his wife, Tilda Hillyer, of Middle Economy, Nova Scotia."
What Is Left the Daughter Page 6