Ursula Hegi The Burgdorf Cycle Boxed Set: Floating in My Mother's Palm, Stones from the River, The Vision of Emma Blau. Children and Fire

by Hegi, Ursula

Tobias nodded. I won’t come to your funeral What if he’s drowning? I won’t save him. What if a train is coming right at him? No. What if—

  “Because you’re awfully thin.” He had gone into Tobias’ room one day when the children had been at school and Helene at the store, and he’d found nothing built from the wood he’d given him, nothing made from matchsticks. The room had been so bare that he’d felt a deep failure at having a son who lived in his house as if he were a guest. He had checked beneath the boy’s bed, inside his closet, feeling odd and yet unable to stop himself as he’d opened his closet and drawers; but other than clothes, he’d found nothing personal. Nothing. He’d been seized by a piercing and inexplicable homesickness, and it wasn’t until now, in the boat, that he knew the homesickness had to do with the distance from this son whom he hadn’t tried to know. And that something had been wrong between him and the boy for much longer than these last few weeks since he’d made him break his toy animals.

  Suddenly he wanted to fill Tobias with the best nourishment he could provide for him, build a wall of safety between his son and death by cooking for him, him alone, as extravagantly as for an entire wedding party: cream of leek soup; liver pâté; ratatouille; omelets stuffed with the tapenade he made from garlic and capers and ground hazelnuts; roasted vegetables brushed with olive oil; frangipani—hazelnuts. Put hazelnuts on the list. Cream. “You really should eat more,” Stefan said hoarsely.

  Even my body. Even that is not right for him. What if a tree falls on him? No. What if he asks for me while dying? No.

  “If you weren’t so thin, you’d look a lot like my father.… You know what he used to tell me?”

  Don’t, Tobias thought, but here it was already, the old embarrassing story about the hair, about Blau men being hairier than other men.…

  “’You can recognize a Blau by his back,’ that’s what my father told me. ‘Pelts,’ he would say, ‘regular pelts.…’ And that he could pick out a Blau man, just by his back, from a hundred men.” Stefan reached across to touch his son’s shoulder.

  But Tobias flinched.

  Stefan’s hand fell away. “Let me have the oars,” he said hoarsely and motioned to pinpricks of rain on the surface of the lake. “I want to get you home.”

  Tobias hadn’t noticed the drops till he saw their indentations on the water, but when his father turned the boat around, he felt them cold on his wrists, his forehead. Curving his shoulders, he tucked his fingers beneath his armpits and watched his father’s house draw near, immense beyond the dock and the stripe of pale sand. On the gray water, its reflection was even more immense, spreading toward the rowboat like spilled ink, darker than the clouds; and as the rain came at him, harder, the house seemed to be boiling around him and his father.

  After that, Tobias became aware how much he disliked to be touched—not just by his father, but by anyone. It could be a teacher resting a hand on his shoulder, boys brushing against him in the hallway or sitting so close to him in class that Tobias would feel their elbows against his, making him feel hot and jumpy. Though he ignored girls, they were always going dreamy over him: they’d follow him on his way to classes, ask Greta and Robert questions about him, stroll past the Wasserburg hoping to see him. Even Fanny Braddock chased after him, affectionate like a three-year-old though they both were twelve.

  “You have a nice, nice body,” she’d say and get on her toes to kiss him on the cheek.

  Usually he’d dodge her, though, with her, he didn’t mind touch because he’d known her all his life, her oddness, her weakness, her sweetness. Warm days she’d sit on the front steps of the building, sucking at her knuckles while watching the weather and waiting for him to come home from school. For a while, her parents had tried to keep her in school, but since she’d distracted other students or simply wandered off, the principal had suggested keeping her home.

  “She isn’t capable of learning,” he’d said, infuriating Pearl Bloom who started to read to Fanny every morning for an hour. Though Fanny got fidgety when Pearl tried to get her to look at a book, she liked to touch newspapers, those large soft sheets of paper that smudged when she rubbed her palms across the letters. And she’d listen with fascination to any article or report that had to do with weather. Because weather she knew. Weather she could see and smell and taste every minute of every day. Weather she felt behind her eyes before it happened. That’s why she liked it whenever the weather report in the paper was wrong.

  Elated when she’d see Tobias turn the corner, Fanny would leap up from the steps, run toward him, and then skip alongside him all the way into the elevator, telling him about rain or sun or a storm that was coming. It was easy for him to be kind to Fanny because she couldn’t do anything to him. The same with Robert who was hesitant, gentle. Who was not at all like their father. Who brought their father as much disappointment as Tobias did.

  Although Robert was at first suspicious of his brother’s sudden attention, he came to count on Tobias over the next years when he was teased about being fat. Other boys would leave him alone when Tobias appeared, sullen and intense as if searching for a reason to fight. Helene was glad that Robert and Tobias were getting along, even if it meant an increase in pranks because Robert was turning into his brother’s willing and accomplished apprentice. Those pranks were harmless, she told herself, maybe even good for Robert, because they took him out of his shyness. Pranks like tearing down Miss Garland’s signs about shaking out umbrellas or not dragging sand into the lobby. Nuisance signs that no one missed.

  What she didn’t know was that Tobias was teaching Robert the sharp-sweet taste of danger by standing on the edge of the railroad platform and leaning into the breath of fast approaching trains. She did get complaints however from school where, to the teachers’ dismay, Robert tried to be as noisy as Tobias. Even at the Royal where the two liked to see Sunday matinees and whistle whenever people kissed on the screen. They wanted to be as wicked as John Barrymore in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and although they made fun of Gloria Swanson in Male and Female, they both cried over the death of Lillian Gish in Broken Blossoms. They pretended to be John Barrymore when they dropped soap into the fountain that bubbled in the lobby of the theater or when they ran up and down the royal-blue carpeted stairs while the ticket matron chased behind them.

  The evening of Tobias’ fourteenth birthday, they figured out a way to mess with the floating fire escape. If they climbed down the metal stairs to the second floor where it hung suspended on a pulley, their combined weight caused it to drop. Although their father knew that heavy snowfalls brought the metal structure down, he couldn’t figure out why this was suddenly happening without snow and only on the side of the house that he couldn’t see from the restaurant. But Homer Wilson noticed that Robert became unusually furtive on days when the fire escape came down—no talent for deception, that one—and he began to watch the boy and caught him and his brother early one morning bouncing on the metal landing while the steps descended to the sidewalk.

  They accepted his offer of silence eagerly in return for stopping this nonsense, as he called it, and he reported to Stefan that the problem was solved.

  “Just needed some tightening,” he muttered.

  1925–1944

  It was nearly impossible to get an apartment in the Wasserburg. People would place their names on the Blaus’ waiting list and take whatever apartment became available, even if it was smaller or larger than what they needed. To live in the Wasserburg meant an increase not only in comfort but also in status—and for that it was worth it to make sacrifices. Whenever someone moved out, Stefan gave his current tenants first claim to the vacant apartment before he offered it to the next person on his waiting list. Moves within the building were handled by Homer and Danny Wilson, who padded the walls of the elevator to protect furniture against scratches. Some tenants had lived in as many as five different apartments since the house’s completion fourteen years earlier.

  Stefan preferred keeping old tenants because n
ew tenants usually needed educating to the way things were done in his building—like the Perellis who promptly installed a wash line between their fourth-floor kitchen and bathroom windows and hung their personal laundry out there for everyone to see. Over the past years, while Louis Perelli and Rosalie Nussbaum had both been married to other people, they had watched how the Blaus had improved the town just by the example of their Wasserburg; and now that Louis was divorced and Rosalie widowed, they’d married, though they were over forty. For the walls of their apartment they’d chosen fern-green paint. While Rosalie had brought her French rococo furniture and a trunk full of expensive men’s boots into the marriage, her new husband had arrived with the stuffed animals he’d shot on safaris.

  The first time Robert saw those animals, he was playing in the courtyard of the Wasserburg, floating paper hats in the fountain. When the movers carried those huge, lifeless beasts past him and up the front steps of the building, they were the saddest creatures he’d ever seen, and he longed to restore their lives to them, longed for it so strongly that he knew all at once he would become a veterinarian, keeping animals alive. In the past, grownups had asked him occasionally what he wanted to be once he was grown up, and he’d felt dumb not knowing. But now he knew. Already he could see himself telling Miss Garland and Mr. Evans. “I want to become a veterinarian.”

  But when he tried to tell Tobias about becoming a veterinarian, his brother only asked, “Are the Perellis’ animals bigger than our father?”

  “Much bigger.”

  Tobias nodded to himself as if he already knew. “So they’re coming back into the house. Did you see any that are two of one kind?”

  “No.”

  “Still… They’re coming back into the house.”

  Even after a full month of marriage, the second Mrs. Perelli would still get startled when coming around a corner and seeing a leopard or a wild boar poised forever to charge at her. But she was pleased that her new husband wore the boots of her dead husband whose clothes she’d given to the Temple a week after his heart failure. His boots, though, she’d kept because they were of excellent quality, and then—as if by miracle—Louis Perelli had turned out to have the same shoe size, certainly a sign that she was meant to marry him.

  She did not like it at all when Stefan Blau came to her door to complain about her laundry hanging in the fresh air. “We have a drying room in the cellar. Mrs. Wilson will be glad to show you how it works.”

  “But I like the smell of wind on my laundry,” Rosalie Perelli insisted, small eyes glinting.

  He took in the rouge on her cheeks, the carefree hair piled atop her head. “It cheapens the appearance of my building to have laundry hanging from the windows.”

  Twice more he came to her door to remind her. After that, he kept checking automatically for a wash line fastened between her windows, and he felt satisfied when he didn’t see one, unaware that Rosalie Perelli still dried her laundry outside every Thursday night, and that she was stubborn enough to stay up late until he’d closed his restaurant, and that she got up early to reel her line in before dawn.

  Another tenant who made him uncomfortable was the Braddock girl whose parents let her roam the building and who had a way of smiling at people that just wasn’t right—the kind of smile little girls will give you before their mothers teach them that it’s not proper or safe to smile at men like that. Sometimes Fanny Braddock would saunter into his restaurant, grab a sponge in the kitchen, and start cleaning his counters, going after every speck and glancing up from the side, wanting him to notice how well she was doing. If he wasn’t busy, he would let her. But usually he’d have to send her home. Other times she’d be in the lobby of the Wasserburg and slip with him into the elevator, smiling that smile of hers. Ever since he’d heard that she’d kissed old Mr. Evans in the elevator, he’d stayed far away from her. If you didn’t stop her, she’d ride the elevator all day. Up and down. Some days when he had to wait for the elevator, sure enough there’d be Fanny Braddock, greeting him when the door finally folded open on his floor. It was wasteful.

  He already had enough other worries about expenses. Despite high rents, the building swallowed most of its revenues in maintenance and improvements. Profits from his restaurant took care of his family’s living expenses. By now he’d set aside enough money to pay Lelia Flynn once she demanded the return of her loan, but she never reminded him, and he wondered if it was out of generosity or because her memory was failing. There certainly were signs of decline: she was forgetting names, appointments. Fortunately Father Albin and Dr. Miles would call him whenever Lelia didn’t arrive for a scheduled visit. He’d drive to her house, and if she didn’t open her door—her hearing was weak—he’d wait outside for a few minutes before he let himself in with the key she kept under a flowerpot on her porch. He made sure she had enough food in the house, and if he was too busy, he sent Greta or one of his waiters with a covered tray.

  One Thursday afternoon Lelia didn’t hear him until he walked into her dining room where she sat at her bare table—no dishes, no food, no tablecloth—stroking her fingers as if struggling to pull off tight gloves.

  “I have an idea,” he said. “How would you like to move into the Wasserburg?”

  “I wouldn’t know how to live with so many other people. …” She shook her head. “No. Oh no.”

  “You’ll have your own apartment,” he encouraged her.

  “It’s not for me, Stefan.” Her gray eyelashes flickered. “No. Thank you.”

  “You would only need to talk when you’d feel like it. And you’d be right there with your granddaughter.”

  Again, she said, “It’s not for me.” But then she peered at him in a strange, probing way as though waiting for him to say something else.

  “What is it?” he asked, though he knew that it had to be about the loan, that she wanted him to bring it up. Instantly, he felt offended. She should trust by now that—regardless how much longer she lived—the money he owed her would ultimately belong to Greta. He was simply preserving it for his daughter. Far better than Lelia could. And if occasionally he had to withdraw from that fund to repair the furnace, say, or modernize the loading platform in back of the garage, that too was ultimately for Greta’s benefit since, one day, after both he and Helene were gone, his children would inherit everything he owned. Things like that were understood without words.

  The first Sunday of May 1925, Father Albin climbed the stairs to his pulpit, but instead of preaching, he announced that his urine was bloody and asked his congregation to pray for his kidney stones to dissolve. Embarrassed by a public prayer of such personal detail, the people of Winnipesaukee averted their eyes; yet, the priest raised his voice as if forcing them and God to look upon him.

  “Lord, I stand here before you with these good people who ask your mercy for me. Lord, my urine is red as the sea you parted for Moses.”

  Several women rushed their children from the pews and toward the door.

  But the priest’s voice followed them. “Lord, I don’t sleep well, and last night, when I lay on the floor and passed those wretched stones you have cursed me with, I cursed you as they traveled down my malehood.”

  Others stood up. Stalked from the church.

  Those who stayed whispered. About how they’d seen Father grip his crotch in the almost dark confessional. How the bishop had suggested an operation. How Father had said he didn’t want Dr. Miles or any other quack to cut on him there. When people speculated about his odd behavior—crazy, some called it—Lelia Flynn defended the priest, though even she had to concede that he’d made too many inappropriate comments. It wasn’t clear who informed on Father Albin—Helene heard from Miss Garland that the bishop had found out about the prayer from nine different parishioners—but the following week the bishop admitted Father Albin to a Catholic convalescent home in Concord that had one entire wing just for crazy priests.

  His temporary replacement was a young priest from Boston, Noah Creed, whose name�
��so the people in town said—sounded as though he’d been intended for priesthood since birth, and they were not surprised when he told the altar boys that his mother had chosen that name for him in the hope that he would become a priest.

  The Sunday Helene invited him for lunch, Lelia sat next to him at the oval mahogany table where she used to sit with Father Albin, and as she watched him eat the Schweinebraten—pork roast—in tidy and precise bites, she knew he was the kind of man she would have liked for her Elizabeth. He appeared well taken care of. By the church and before that by his family. It was the kind of bearing Lelia Flynn knew well because she had it herself. The kind that comes from a history of others looking after you—parents and maids and tutors—instilling in you a generosity that grows from appreciating the certainty that there’ll always be others who’ll consider it a privilege to anticipate your needs.

  With a man like that, my Elizabeth would still be alive.

  Suddenly she felt disloyal to Stefan who sat at the head of the table, eating hurriedly as he usually did when he wanted to get back to the restaurant. A bad example for Robert, who was eating just as quickly. Sometimes it made Lelia queasy, watching him go at his food like that. She looked at Helene, wondering if she ought to speak to her about the boy’s manners and size. But how to do that without offending her? It was obvious that feeding the boy was Helene’s way of loving him better than the other children. She liked to talk about how he liked to eat. Once, she’d confided to Lelia how it pleased her that Robert preferred her solid meals—roasts and Apfelstrudel and herring salad with beets—to his father’s delicacies. As far as Lelia had noticed, the boy ate anything. In huge quantities. Except for rice—the one food he refused eating. Odd, Lelia thought.

  “Can I get you anything?” Helene asked.

  Lelia realized that she’d been staring at her.

  Helene smiled. “Can I get you anything?” she asked again.