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

  When Noah Creed replied, he suggested she make a list of what she liked. “And then provide those things for yourself.”

  Oranges.

  Solitude.

  Trousers instead of skirts.

  Chocolate.

  Books.

  Walks along the lake.

  Being with my family—though not as much as being alone.

  Noah Creed.

  She sent him her list except for the last item on it. She’d never missed anyone before, but Noah Creed had been walking through her dreams since that afternoon she’d rowed him out on the lake. Much easier to provide chocolate for myself. Still, his suggestion to provide for herself what she liked gave her the idea to volunteer for errands her family or even the tenants had in Boston. She would take the train and stay at the Blanchard Hotel in a room overlooking the Charles River. And if she had no reason to travel there, she would invent one, because to admit to a two-hundred-mile round trip just to meet Father Creed for dinner would have been risky because he would have felt forced to stop seeing her.

  She brought back a set of French pans for her father’s restaurant.

  Silk roses for Pearl Bloom.

  A blue terrycloth robe for her stepmother.

  Sunglasses for Buddy Hedge.

  Silk dresses and high-heeled shoes for herself as if visiting a priest required a different sort of attire than the loose, pleated trousers and blouses without starch that she normally wore. Yet, along with her familiar clothes, she also left behind some of her stillness, so that the priest came to know her as excitable and rather strained, her ease lost to her in those formal and ill-fitting clothes.

  Deeply committed to his vows, Noah Creed made sure to remind her of the church whenever he became uncomfortable with her devotion. Still, he was not willing to do without that devotion—as long as he could hold it in check with references to his priesthood.

  As Greta prepared for those overnight trips, she’d ask her stepmother’s opinion on which clothes to take, evoking for Helene the faceless priest of her fantasies. It amused Helene, made her wonder if by imagining a priest for herself decades ago, she had somehow manifested Noah Creed for her stepdaughter. Ironic. At least Greta knew her priest’s features. “Priests can be great lovers,” she imagined herself telling Greta. “Mine was often faceless”

  Instead she limited herself to advice on which colors looked best on Greta. And when her husband got intrigued by his idea that his daughter was trying to snatch a priest from God, Helene made him promise not to tease Greta. He liked to say Greta should snatch at least two priests to even out what God had robbed him of. “Greta’s visiting her priest,” he’d hum when he’d step from the elevator to find the lobby empty—no one waiting today to be healed, hallelujah—and when Greta returned on the train, he’d be there for her at the station, searching beyond her embrace for the black-clad figure of a priest emerging from the train; but she would always be by herself, quieter than usual, and as soon as she’d settle in his car, she’d slip off her tight shoes.

  She bought transparent gel to fortify her delicate fingernails.

  A backpack and suitcase for Tobias when he left for Connecticut a month before his freshman year at Yale started.

  Six chocolate bars for Robert that he ate without stopping though he loathed that part of himself he thought of as Fatboy and would have liked to obliterate. Fatboy had been born fully grown one morning during gym. While playing volleyball, Robert had felt Fatboy inside himself, settling to stay, reminding him: One more hour till lunch. Robert hated gym, hated the way his legs jiggled when he ran, the way his stomach bounced. On Dr. Miles’ scale he weighed 187 pounds. The most ever. Al and Matthew on the other side of the net, skinny-fast, whispered something. Laughed. Robert knew they were making fun of him. He was hungry. A Bratwurst sandwich today, Fatboy reminds him. And a pear. Tomorrow will be better: pork cutlets from tonight’s dinner, plum cake for dessert. The ball came toward him, and he rushed forward, bounced it off the inside of his wrists. “Good shot,” somebody shouted. And it was a good shot. But everyone was staring. Some were laughing. At him. His wrist stung. The elastic of his shorts cut into his waist. His thighs were chafed where they rubbed together.

  Greta bought smaller tablecloths for her stepmother now that she’d taken the leaves out of her mahogany table.

  Cosmetics and magazines and gloves for Pearl who always had a list for her. But after the crash in the fall of 1929, the Blooms had a lot less money and many more arguments. Nate even brought up the old argument that she wasted soap.

  “How could those slivers of dried-up soap have helped you?” Pearl challenged him.

  “It’s the principle of saving.”

  “You haven’t saved on anything else for as long as I’ve known you.”

  “It’s different now.”

  And it was. For the Blooms as well as for others in the building, the town, the country who’d bought stocks on margin during the Hoover bull market, often for less than five percent down, borrowing the rest from their brokers. While Nate still had Liberty Bonds and land and gold, the Clarkes lost everything and moved out of the Wasserburg. Already business at Stefan’s restaurant was declining, and he had to let go of one cook and two of his waiters.

  But through all those changes, Greta kept returning to Boston at least once a month. Several times she bought sheet music for Robert who’d felt restless ever since Tobias had left, and who would immerse himself even more in his music until he, too, would go to college, Ohio State, to study veterinary medicine.

  Sometimes, sitting in a compartment, Greta would catch a glance into other trains as they passed, and be left with momentary images of people as smoke billowed between her and those people who were not constant in her life. Despite that fleetingness—or perhaps because of that fleetingness—she’d feel connected to them in an odd way.

  As the priest’s hair receded and his limber body grew more solid, he began to worry that Greta might encounter a man who might be available to her every day. To keep her from slipping from him, he would plan their next meeting while she was still with him in Boston and write her thoughtful letters, advising her in her selection of the books she read and the charities she supported: two hospitals, an animal shelter, an education program for deaf children. He liked to make a fuss over her birthdays, taking her out to dinner and then to the opera.

  On her twenty-eighth birthday, they saw La Traviata, but she found it impossible to enjoy the opera because she was thinking about the troubles in Germany. Recently, the newspapers had been full of Adolf Hitler. His meeting with Mussolini. His execution of several officers who were suspected of trying to overthrow him.

  Her parents were worried about everything having to do with Germany. Hitler’s increasing power. Their families. Even about their accents that had worn smooth in their years of living in America, but were still noticeable enough to remind others that they had come from Germany. Only last week, her stepmother had said, “What reassurance can we offer them here that we are not dangerous to them? The way they believe every German in Germany is.”

  As Greta and Noah Creed walked down the steps of the opera house, she wondered how she would feel if she’d been born in Germany and had an accent. But since her mother had been American, the townspeople considered her one of their own.

  “You seem sad tonight,” Noah said.

  All at once she didn’t want to think about Germany. She tried to smile at Noah. “Maybe it’s because of these operas you take me to—they all end with people dying of broken hearts.”

  “I never thought of them that way.”

  “And they all need something else to help death along … consumption in La Traviata, poison in Romeo and Juliette, a pistol in Werther … but basically they die of broken hearts.”

  He gave a theatrical sigh and covered his heart with one palm. “They die for love.”

  “After suffering great agony.”

  “Yes, but they have a moment of bliss to
gether just before they die. Romeo … Werther—”

  “But it’s only for a moment. So …”

  “What is it? Why are you grinning like that?”

  “So Catholic.”

  “Catholic? Wait till we see Madam Butterfly.”

  “She dies for love too?”

  “Commits hari-kari.”

  “For love.”

  “For love.”

  “Foolish people.”

  “You think so?”

  She felt his eyes as strongly as she would have felt his hands had he brought them to her skin, and as he kept her there in his gaze, his left arm rose toward her as if to touch her chin. Though he dropped his arm quickly, it was the kind of gesture Greta would replay in her mind in the weeks to come and file away with hundreds like it, magnifying its significance, letting it comfort her through the nights.

  When Danny looked up, Tobias was standing in the opening of the garage door, wearing a gray suit. Behind him the sky was equally gray as if all the world had suddenly gone black and white, no color at all, and Danny thought that this was good. Very good.

  “Ten years,” Tobias said.

  In those years since that other day here in the garage, Tobias had been friendly but distant with Danny, and Danny had thought he’d forgotten, although he himself had thought of it often—not in the way of expecting Tobias to come to him like this exactly ten years afterwards, but rather remembering the pale scalp beneath Tobias’ short hair … the knobs on the back of Tobias’ neck … and Tobias’ hand against his chest as if reaching inside for his heart. Remembering. And imagining more. Fifteen years old Tobias had been, and what had stayed with Danny most was the courage it must have taken Tobias to come toward him like that. Like a sleepwalker almost. And the will it took me to push him away.

  “You’re back,” Danny said, remembering Tobias’ eyelash on his thumb. “Blow it away and make a wish, Mr. Tobias Blau,” he’d told him, and Tobias had made a wish, had extracted a promise: “When you’re as old as I am.” To Yale he’d gone, the brightest of the Blau children, and Danny hadn’t seen much of him except for brief visits during the summer and Christmas vacations—never the entire vacation because Tobias had school friends in New York and Boston who invited him.

  “Yes. I’m back.” With sudden and weightless grace, Tobias hoisted himself up to sit on the workbench between the vise and a bucket, no longer all-gray because he was framed by the wooden shelves behind him, by pliers and wrenches that hung from hooks beneath those shelves.

  “You’ll get oil on your good suit.” Immediately, Danny wished he hadn’t said that. It sounded fussy. Like the fussy bachelor he’d become.

  Tobias’ fingers curved around Danny’s upper arms.

  All at once Danny felt incredibly shy. “No false teeth yet,” he said, trying to joke himself free of a shyness more awkward than the first time with Stewart Robichaud and with other men.

  “That’s a relief.”

  “And no family.”

  “I didn’t think so.”

  And then Danny was standing between Tobias’ knees, his hands on Tobias, swifter than their words had taken them, noticing how Tobias’ jaw had widened with the years, changing the shape of his face from heart-shaped to oval. But how he still had that straight line of freckles across the bridge of his nose. And remembering his Aunt Irene trying to wipe off that line with spit and Tobias breaking free from her. Why am I thinking about my aunt now? Now. He’d never been able to call her Mother, hadn’t been able to be the son she’d imagined, the son who would prefer her to his first mother, the son who would marry and give her the grandchildren she waited for with the same urgency she’d waited for his adoption.

  Five months ago, without any prior word to him, she and his uncle had told him they were getting their marriage annulled. His uncle had retired to Florida, though he wasn’t sixty yet; and his aunt had gone where no man could follow, had joined a group of rebel nuns who were fighting to be recognized by the church, women who’d left marriages and were working at getting them annulled. After praying to find the best possible name for their order, they’d followed his aunt’s suggestion: Sisters of the Angel of Mercy. Two of them were wealthy, and they’d bought a three-story brick house right next to the Catholic church in Concord where, to the mortification of the priest, they’d established their convent and attended daily mass, wearing severe black habits. Danny had visited her twice, meeting with her on a bench in the churchyard, and as she’d told him about the sisters’ feud with the bishop, he’d felt affectionate toward her now that he was no longer the focus of her disappointment. Stop thinking about her.

  But he was still thinking about her as he and Tobias moved toward each other once more, slower now, seeing her with Mrs. Teichman and hearing the seamstress telling his aunt that she’d no longer sew for the Blaus because they were German. Why am I thinking of this now? Because Tobias is too. His Germanness.

  “We could go to my apartment.” Danny steadied himself against Tobias. “Someone might come in.”

  “But your workbench—it’s part of it. Do you know that every fantasy I’ve had of you always included that workbench?”

  “I’m flattered… I think.”

  “Sometimes I didn’t even need to think of you.”

  “That story of yours—does it allow that I might have a life away from your workbench?”

  “Now you sound pissed.”

  “That doesn’t fit your story either?”

  “Don’t be pissed, okay? It’s just that all I needed was to think of that workbench.” Tobias decided not to tell Danny that in some of those fantasies his father had entered the garage, had found him loving Danny, and that Tobias had ignored him, had continued with Danny. Like now.

  “My workbench, huh?” Danny took Tobias by the shoulders. “No wonder you put your ass right on it.”

  “Priorities … I mean, don’t you get a hard-on thinking about pipes and wires and tiles and screws—”

  “Don’t forget pliers.”

  “—and grease and nails and …” Tobias leaned back his head and inhaled deeply.

  “Bliss.”

  “Bliss?”

  “Being here—” “On the workbench?”

  “No, no, with you. So …”

  “So what?”

  “Am I still invited to your apartment then?”

  Although they would never make plans to be together in the years to come, Danny knew enough about the Blaus’ family patterns to predict Tobias’ returns from Hartford where he’d become the manager of a bookstore. Never for his father’s birthdays, but usually for his stepmother’s and Greta’s, always for Robert’s. Sometimes he visited in February if the ice on the bay was thick enough for skating and ice fishing—except of course for those years when Tobias would be stationed in England and Danny could only imagine being with him.

  While some of the Jewish tenants began to treat the Blaus differently—with uncomfortable silences or even hostility—Nate and Pearl Bloom continued their friendship with them. Nate and Stefan never discussed Germany, but Helene and Pearl were able to talk about the newspaper accounts that reported the persecution of countless Jews. Pearl knew how conflicted Helene felt about being German, how she worried about the Jews in her hometown, the Abramowitzes and the Rosens and Frau Simon.

  Every month she sent packages with food and money concealed in the hollow cores of spools to her brother and his daughter and Stefan’s family, who wrote fearful letters about what was happening in their town. But in 1941 mail from Germany stopped, and all Helene knew came from American newspapers that wrote about Germany as a monster with many arms, a Germany she no longer understood because it was not at all like the town she knew so well, a town no larger than the town of Winnipesaukee.

  The few times she tried to explain to people in Winnipesaukee about the ordinary people back home in Burgdorf, like her brother and Margret, they looked at her as though she were defending the enemy. And it was not that. Only th
at she could not take the newspapers’ descriptions of Germans as evil and apply them to everyone over there. Because if she had stayed in Germany, the Americans would see her as evil too. Mrs. Teichman already did. And others in town regarded Helene with a different awareness of her Germanness, considered her punctuality and efficiency German traits, where before they would have thought of them as part of her personality. It made her want to miss appointments, slop food on her dress. Made her want to say, “It’s not what Germans are like.”

  And yet to say that felt dangerous. Suspect. Even to herself. Because what was stronger than her pain at being eased out was her horror at the violence committed against the Jews and the unavoidable certainty that there had to be people—ordinary people, too—who were making this happen. How could they live with that knowledge? But in trying to understand, she always kept coming back to her own family in Burgdorf, to people she loved over there. How to connect them with those reports? And yet, what felt terribly familiar in all this was that attitude of superiority she knew from having grown up there, from seeing it bloom so quickly against anyone who was considered to be different. Still—how could it have turned into something so monumental?

  When Germany had declared war on Poland, she’d been terrified, and her consolation had been that at least Leo was too old to fight, and that Leo’s child was a daughter, not a son. Because it was Trudi’s generation that was fighting the war. The Weilers’ son. The Hansens’ son. Both Weskopp sons. To imagine sending a son off to war. It had to be worse than seeing a husband go.

  And then it had happened to her.

  First Tobias.

  Then Robert.

  How to sleep through a night when your sons were in a war? How to not think of soldiers buried or returning broken like Axel Lambert?

  1944

  Robert, who fought in North Africa, would be the first to return in February of 1944, a bullet in his left thigh. The month after he had surgery and moved back in with his parents, he opened a one-room veterinary clinic next to the hardware store. Though he didn’t have much time for his music, Pearl coaxed him until he agreed to play the piano at Nate Bloom’s seventieth birthday that spring, an elegant event to which she’d invited friends from Boston, the town, and the building. The guest of honor was Nate’s son, who had never visited his father before.