by Torey Hayden
Wearily, Megan looked away. With the toe of one foot, she nudged the base of the shelves. ‘Is that what you believe?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘I don’t know,’ she said doubtfully. ‘Maybe so. Maybe not.’
Then one night I dreamed of Klaus. I dreamed I saw him in a field of sunflowers. He was a baby still, abandoned in a laundry basket. He was some distance away among the stalks. Although I could see him, I was terrified of going in among the sunflowers to get him. Yet the urge to rescue Klaus and be the one to bring him to my mother was so strong that I managed to plunge in anyway. At least I kept trying to. It was one of those frustrating dreams where everything I did was of no use, and I could hardly get through the stalks. By the time I finally reached the basket, I discovered it was no longer Klaus in there but rather Megan’s stuffed tiger cat.
I woke up crying. It was sometime after three in the morning, and I woke, choked with tears. Sitting up, I turned on the bedside lamp to dispel the dream, but it clung to me, seeming very real. Amid my rumpled bedclothes, I sat and wept.
Rubbing his eyes, my father appeared in the doorway. His hair was wildly tousled. He was bare chested, wearing only the bottoms to his blue-striped pyjamas, the ones that were too long for him and hung down over the tops of his feet.
‘What’s wrong, sweetheart?’ he asked, shuffling into the brightness of my little lamp. He reached down to touch my hair. ‘Did you have a bad dream or something? What’s happened?’
I couldn’t answer.
‘Hey now,’ he whispered and sat down on the bed. Putting his arms around me, he pulled me close against the crinkly hair on his chest.
I tried to explain. I tried to tell him about the dream, about how I had found Klaus, about wanting to go among the sunflowers to get him. And then when I had, it hadn’t been Klaus, and the bitter disappointment had awakened me. Daddy kept his hand against my face and whispered softly into my hair. He kissed me. But I could not stop crying. It wasn’t the disappointment that had shattered me so much. What had was the brutal realization when I woke that, even if I had found Klaus, Mama was no longer there to bring him back to.
I could see I had to leave. Again and again I tried to explain to my father what I meant, why I felt getting away was so necessary. I couldn’t see how he’d fail to understand what it was like for me in this family, to be smothered by things, great, glorious and extending back before memory. But I was apparently not finding the right words, because every time I tried, he would simply frown and turn away.
What are you searching for? he would ask. Why are you running away? What do you want to escape?
I could no more answer his questions than he could answer mine.
‘Where are you thinking of going?’ Dad asked me one evening while we were doing the supper dishes together.
I shrugged.
‘Would you like to go spend some time with Caroline and Roger? I got a letter from Caroline today. She says you can spend the summer with them, if you’d like. I was telling her about things, you know, and she says they’d be more than glad to have you. Roger says he might be able to give you work in his office. Not much, maybe some filing and phone answering. But it’d be pocket money.’
‘No.’
My father looked at me. He had his shirt sleeves rolled up and his hands plunged into the dishwater. There were suds up to his elbows.
‘Dad, I need to get away. Not go visiting Auntie Caroline and Uncle Roger. You see what I mean?’
‘Not really, Lesley, I must admit.’
I scratched the side of my face, I turned away, then back. Picking up a glass from the counter, I dried it and then held it up to the light to see if I’d gotten all the spots. ‘What I think,’ I said, more to the glass than my father, ‘is that I want to go see the places Mama was at. After the war.’
‘Like where?’
I shrugged. ‘Hungary, maybe. Germany. Or Wales.’
‘Oh, surely not there. You don’t need to go that far. I don’t want you gallivanting all over creation on your own.’
‘I’m eighteen.’
‘I’m well aware of that. And in many ways you’re very mature and responsible. But we’ve never vacationed much, Lesley, and you’re not very informed about things like that. Those are foreign countries you’re talking about.’
‘I can manage.’
I took up a pot and dried it with intense thoroughness. Then I dried the plates and took them to the cupboard.
‘It would be nice to work in Uncle Roger’s office, I think,’ my father said at last. His voice was soft but hopeful. ‘And you could stay with them in their house. You’ve always liked their house. Remember that big porch swing? And Caroline says she’ll take you shopping in Chicago. Maybe you can get some new things for college. Caroline could help you. She’s very good with that sort of thing, you know. She was always the best of all the girls when it came to looking nice. And Betsy and Carl are over all the time with the grandkids. You’d be the first to see Betsy’s new baby. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’
‘No.’
‘You could think about it. I’ll tell Caroline that you’re considering it.’
‘No, Dad. I’m not considering it.’
He drained the dishpan into the sink. There was distance between us. It might as well have been a mile instead of a few feet. Or a month instead of a few moments. With the sprayer he rinsed the sink out, swirling the water around with the dishrag.
‘So, just what exactly do you think you’re going to do, going to those places?’
I shrugged. ‘Just go there. I was thinking mostly about Forest of Flowers. We still have the tickets. I thought I could go and see what it was like.’
He turned on the tap.
‘Or I thought I might go to Germany. I’d like to see some of those places, those camps and stuff, where all those things took place. They’ve had such an influence on my life that I’d just like to know what they look like.’
He squeezed out the dishrag. There was silence, faint and ill-defined by the sounds of the faucet. I dried my hands on the dish towel and then pressed it to my cheek. It was damp and felt good in the humid heat of the kitchen.
‘Actually,’ I said, ‘I was thinking that if I went to Germany, maybe I would look for Klaus.’
My father’s activity at the sink halted abruptly. Frozen for a moment, he made no sound. The colour drained away from his cheeks and left his face an ashen hue.
‘No,’ he said sharply.
‘Dad, Klaus is my brother, my half brother. He’s my flesh and blood. After all that’s happened, I really would like to see him. I keep thinking about him all the time, about who he is and what he’s like. I dream about him. I just cannot get him out of my mind.’
‘No,’ he said flatly. ‘Holy God in heaven, Lesley, I am not going to let this happen to you too. If you want to go off on some cockeyed trip, if you feel your life is so blighted that you can’t exist without that and you have to go, that’s one thing. In the end I can probably accept that. But not this. Not Germany. Germany I forbid. Klaus is not going to get you too.’
‘It’s different for me than for Mama, Dad.’
‘No. It isn’t. And he’s not having you. I mean it. You don’t go there.’
The expression on his face left no room for argument. Sighing, I turned away and hung up the dish towel. It seemed hopeless, this conversation. We’d already had it in so many other forms. ‘Don’t you understand, Dad?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t. I guess that’s the whole problem between you and me.’
‘I carry Klaus and Germany and Lébény and Wales and all the other places around inside of me, like that stuff happened to me instead of you and Mama. I’ve got your worlds in my head. And I need to make my own world. It’s time for me to grow up and have some experiences of my own. Not just secondhand ones.’
Slowly he turned and leaned back against the counter. He regarded me for several moments. ‘To me,’ he said at
last, ‘it doesn’t sound like you know what you do want, Lesley. On one hand, all you talk about is escaping, getting new experiences, getting away from the burden this family suddenly seems to have become for you. And on the other hand, where is it that you want to go? Back to these very same places Mama told you about. Back to Mama’s stories. Back to Klaus, after all he’s done to us. I guess I could understand it if you wanted to go somewhere completely foreign, to Spain or Norway or Argentina, but the places you’re talking about are no escape. And it just doesn’t make sense to me.’
Frustrated, I stood without replying. I didn’t know what to say to him to make him understand what I meant.
‘You’re not going to find any answers over there. I can tell you that right now, Lesley.’
‘Well,’ I replied, ‘if I can’t find the answers, then at least I need to find the questions.’
Chapter Twenty-nine
I decided on Wales. It was the least volatile of my options, and moreover, the travel arrangements were already sorted out. Dad suggested that I write a letter to the farmer who owned Forest of Flowers and see if he minded if I visited and if he could tell me where to stay while I was there.
The son of the farmer wrote back to me. His father had died in 1968 and he was owner of the farm and of Forest of Flowers. I was most welcome to come and see the cottage, he wrote. I could stay at the farm, if I wanted.
Resigned to the notion of the trip, my father sat down one evening and helped me with the impossible-looking Welsh place names. Not a language for foreigners: all the words had too many consonants and sometimes no vowels at all. Carefully, my father pronounced them for me, and they sounded strange coming from his mouth. All those years Mama had chattered away, first in one language and then another, often in the same breath. Never in all that time had I heard my father utter anything but English. He never answered her the way Megan and I had, saying ja ja Mama, until we, like she, said ja all the time, instead of yes, and got into trouble for it at school because our teachers believed we were lazily saying yeah. He never spoke back to her in the language she was using, as we did, so at night when Mama was tired, you could hear a completely bilingual conversation between them, Mama in German, Dad in English, back and forth, as if it were one language. So it sounded odd to hear him say the convoluted Welsh place names so easily. Llanymawddwy. Cwmystradllyn. Bwlch-llwyd-ddu. He wrote out the phonetic pronunciations of the words beside each one for me: Coed-y-Bleiddiau (coyd-uh-BLAITHE-ee-aye), the Welsh name for Forest of Flowers.
Somehow, we survived that May. And finally it was June, the month all the high-school seniors were waiting for. So immersed in these other things was I that I almost forgot graduation was imminent. It had lost its importance for me, other than marking an end. The senior prom, the graduation dinner, the baccalaureate service all went by without my caring. However, my father insisted that I go through the graduation ceremony itself.
The house was in chaos the night of graduation. Megan, wearing nothing but her underpants, was standing at the bottom of the stairs. ‘Dad? Daddy?’ she was bellowing up. ‘You got to iron this for me.’
I was in my room and could hear my father come out of his. He went to the head of the stairway. ‘Megan, you can’t wear that,’ he called down to her. ‘That’s too small for you. Wear the pink dress in your room. The one with the bows on it. It’s already ironed.’
‘Noooo,’ Megan moaned. ‘I want to wear this. But I don’t know how to iron the little thingies. Do it for me, OK?’
‘Wear the other dress,’ I said. ‘That one you have there is too small for you.’
‘No, it isn’t. Please, Dad? I want to wear this one. Please?’
I was standing in front of my mirror. I was already dressed and had pulled on the gown to see how it’d look. The cap, I noticed, was slightly too large and the point in the front came down between my eyebrows. In the mirror I saw Dad go by, returning to his room. He was struggling to get the cufflinks into his shirt. Megan had been left standing at the bottom of the stairs. I could hear her begin to cry.
‘Daddy!’ she wailed. There was no response from his end of the hall.
I stared at myself in the mirror. Thirteen whole years of my life, I thought, if I counted kindergarten. All those Halloween parties and Valentine cards and Christmas plays. All the arithmetic papers and flash cards and papier-mâché maps for social studies. I could very clearly remember learning to read, Mrs Johnson printing the letters carefully on the chalkboard, keeping me after school because I kept forgetting what came after R in the alphabet. I remembered throwing up in the garbage can in second grade, and my teacher telling me what a good girl I was for not throwing up on the floor. I remembered Mama clapping so loudly at the Mother’s Day pageant when I was ten that I told the girl next to me I didn’t know who she was.
And now it was over. Somehow, I’d thought graduation would mean more to me than it did. I felt nothing.
Megan was in the doorway. Eyes teary, she clutched the dress to her chest. It was the blue gingham cotton one with the eyelet pinafore that Mama had bought her for Easter the year before. Megan had been into her overalls-and-turtlenecks stage then and had gotten invited to Easter dinner with her friend Katie, so Mama had had to take her out to get something presentable.
‘Will you iron it for me, Lessie?’ she asked with a snuffle.
‘Megs, it really is too small for you.’
‘No, it isn’t.’
‘Meggie, it’s going to show your underpants when you bend down. You don’t want all the boys to see your panties, do you?’
Tears down her cheeks again, she just stood, staring at it. Her mouth dragged down into an unhappy grimace. ‘I won’t bend down, OK?’
‘Wear the pink one that Daddy has ironed for you already. You look really pretty in that one. You do. It looks nice with your hair.’
‘It’s these,’ she said sorrowfully and fingered around the tucks in the front of the pinafore. ‘I don’t know how to iron them so they look nice. Please, Les, won’t you do it for me?’
Then my father was there. With one hand, he tugged his tie into place. ‘Megan, I thought I told you to put on that other dress. Now I mean it. Put this one away and get going. We’ll be late.’
Once again she was crying in earnest.
Dad sighed, eyes rolling heavenward.
‘Mama would have ironed it for me,’ Megan sobbed. ‘If Mama was here, it wouldn’t be like this.’
‘Even your mama couldn’t have stopped you from growing, sweetheart, and that’s all that’s happened to that dress. Nothing else. Now get down to your room and get changed.’
I watched the whole transaction in my mirror. Still clothed in my cap and gown, I kept my back to the doorway.
‘Are you ready?’ Dad asked me. ‘I want you to come downstairs so we can take some pictures.’
I looked at him.
‘Outside by the spruce tree, I think. That would be a good contrast to your gown.’
‘I don’t want to, Dad.’
‘Are you worrying about Megs? She’ll be all right. You know how she’s been. Don’t worry.’
‘She’s going to be all snotty nosed from crying.’
‘She’ll be OK.’
I continued looking at his image in the mirror. Even from where I was, I could smell his aftershave. It was something with a dreadfully erotic name that Megs had bought him for his birthday. The smell was musky but cloying.
‘I don’t really want to do this,’ I said.
‘What? Take pictures?’
‘No. This. All of it. You know what I mean.’ I pulled out the gown.
‘Once you get going, you’ll be all right. It’s just nerves.’
I shook my head. There was a pause and it grew long and apparent.
‘I don’t feel anything, Dad. Nothing whatsoever. I stand here and I look at myself and it’s like I’m dressed up for Halloween. I just don’t want to go. It’s make-believe. After everything that’s happened, to
pretend this is important is just make-believe.’
He shook his head.
‘I don’t want to go.’
‘If you don’t, you’ll regret it,’ he replied. ‘In years to come, when things are different, you’ll regret missing this a lot, if you don’t go through with it.’
I stared at him in the mirror. I couldn’t imagine when things would ever be different.
Three days after graduation I went with Paul to the park at Third and Elm to walk his dogs. The day was a very warm one. He’d let the dogs off their leashes to run while we sat on a park bench near the playground. The two dogs galloped from spot to spot around the park, sniffing urgently, reading dog messages, leaving them. With my eyes I followed them as they moved, their black tails held jauntily as they went about their business.
‘I got into that course,’ Paul said to me. He was scraping dirt out from under one of his fingernails with a twig. ‘That course that runs first summer term up at Fort Hayes.’
‘The one on computers?’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I didn’t think I was going to get in. Rob Thurman’s going on it too and he’s a lot better at that kind of stuff than I am. He’s going into some kind of computer programming or something at Cal Tech in the fall. Did you know that?’
I shook my head.
‘Anyway, I’m really relieved about this course. I need computing. I mean, you can’t get anywhere in an area like statistics, if you can’t use a computer.’
I wiped perspiration from my temple. Lowering my hand, I looked at the moisture. It made my fingertip glisten in the sunlight.
‘Hey, did I tell you,’ Paul said, ‘I managed to sell my telescope the other day? I got a really good price for it. Almost five hundred dollars. A guy from Dodge City bought it.’
‘Geez.’
‘It was worth more. I paid eight hundred, and that was almost five years ago. And a telescope’s not going to wear out, is it? But even so, that’s more money than I thought I’d get.’