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

Yvonne felt exhilarated, awed, when he removed himself into regions where she couldn’t follow him and—by that act alone—almost made them accessible to her. However, if he raised his hands from the keys to touch her, the reality of his massive body repelled her, and she felt herself go rigid. Ashamed. Because it made her feel like a tease, a bitch. She didn’t want to be like that, and when he’d release her, instantly, eyes distant with hurt, she’d feel compelled to cling to him with excessive caresses that would lead to contrite lovemaking, which left both of them bewildered. Their first child, Caleb—long limbed and exquisite like his mother—would be conceived during one of those nights of troubled copulation just three months after their wedding day.

  1945–1953

  After her initial shock, Yvonne began to sew elegant maternity clothes. Pregnancy was a reason for an entire new wardrobe—flowing materials that concealed her swelling body and lent a slow harmony to her movements. Every night when she oiled her breasts and belly to prevent stretch marks, Robert watched her, paralyzed by the old fear—babies kill mothers. How had his father ever dared to marry again after burying his first wife? His second? In this fear, Robert felt more linked to his father than ever before. Again and again, he apologized to Yvonne for endangering her life, for settling her with stretch marks and with varicose veins that began to branch out on her left leg. It made Yvonne feel generous to reassure him.

  Caleb was born with his eyes wide open—tranquil and intuitive, his grandmother thought as she guided his head in her palms. Dr. Miles was letting her help, and her grandson was gazing at her as if he knew her and wanted her to bring him toward her and away from his mother whose body still confined his shoulders.

  From the beginning of his life, Caleb would absorb all that happened around him—pictures and sounds and smells and touch and taste—take them all in long before words would define them for him, and spin them further, transform them. He would see his surroundings the way a painter would, understanding instinctively how everything picked up light and color from everything else. Like the lake where his mother would take him that first summer of his life, prop him up on the dock in a basket with blankets so that his head would be supported, and swim back and forth in front of him so that he could watch her splash and wave. The reflections in the lake would be a mingling of many colors: his mother’s skin and hair; the mountains and dock; sky and the houses along the shore. And then there was the color of the water itself. Ever-changing. While the dock and houses and his mother would absorb the light that bounced off the water.

  From the instant her son was born, Yvonne was fascinated by him. No one had told her it would be like this. How it moved her—the softness of his downy head in the hollow between her neck and shoulder, that feather of breath against her skin. With astonishment she watched Caleb’s face as he sucked pale strands of milk from her breasts. She was the only one who could do that for him—Helene might bathe him or change his diaper, but she was the one who connected her son to life with an intensity that shut out all else, even those God awful lonely-attacks. Her hair took on a new shimmer, and she smiled when people commented on the softness in her features.

  With a child in her arm at her breast, she felt something unfamiliar that she finally defined as joy, a joy that often lasted for hours and spilled onto others because it was too vast for one child to absorb, a joy that made her feel benevolent toward her family, even the town.

  With a child in her arm at her breast, she was no longer intimidated by Helene’s cooking skills.

  With a child in her arm at her breast, it was only natural to request household help.

  Though Robert couldn’t afford a maid, he was so grateful that Yvonne had survived childbirth, that he didn’t mind cleaning the apartment on Sundays. Yet around Caleb he felt clumsy. Odd, how with newborn dogs and cats—tinier than newborn humans—he was capable, skillful, perhaps because his responsibility for their lives lasted only a brief time. This infant, however, was here to stay. He admired Yvonne’s ease as she held and bathed Caleb, admired her tenderness with their son. If only she would touch me with such joy. But that’s jealous. Wrong.

  He noticed how some tenants regarded him with respect as if his son were a miracle, and how his parents, too, were treating him differently now that he had moved on from being a son to being a parent, equal with them since his own son had taken up the role of child. Sometimes he sang to Caleb in a melodious voice that—had the older people of Winnipesaukee heard him—would have reminded them of Stefan Blau’s tenor in church before his deal with God had proven worthless.

  Gradually, as Robert learned from Yvonne how to bathe and rock his son, he forgave himself for risking her life, and years later during one of her many absences when he’d look back on their marriage, he’d see her holding their son as if she were in a painting—always holding him and always surrounded by light—and he would understand that those early months with their son had been the best part of their marriage.

  Caleb brought out the light and kindness in Yvonne that Robert knew she was capable of, but that his parents were unable to see. “My two boys,” she’d say to Robert some evenings while nursing their son, raising her hand from Caleb’s face to his, and he’d feel glutted with bliss.

  Cautiously, he’d move through her ivory rooms that were too bright for him, too likely to be stained. Wishing he could shrink his bulk, he’d end up standing in the kitchen with milk and cookies or, if there were no cookies, bread with butter and sugar until the sugar made him queasy and he’d neutralize it by sprinkling salt on the buttered bread instead. And keep eating.

  One morning while getting dressed, he saw Yvonne watching him from the bed. Instantly, he felt Fatboy standing right behind him. He knew if he turned around Fatboy would be gone: he never came face to face with him. That wasn’t the way Fatboy waited. But he was there, massively, persistently, studying every movement Robert made, gloating when the scale revealed a gain because it lessened the distance between them. At times he slipped into Robert’s place, fumbling and blushing, larger and more grotesque every minute. While Robert’s walk, his movements became awkward.

  To stop Yvonne from seeing him like that, he said quickly, “I’ve been thinking about cutting out sweets.”

  “What a good idea.” She raised herself on her elbows, sounding pleased as he knew she would. “Just think, if you lose one pound each week, you’ll be trim in two years.”

  “That doesn’t sound too hard,” he lied. How could he ever tell her about Fatboy? About all those times he’d tried to destroy Fatboy by becoming thin? During his sophomore year at Ohio State he’d lost the weight gained in high school. But even then he’d never felt thin enough. One by one the pounds had come back and he had to start all over again.

  “One year if you lose two pounds a week.” She nodded as though she could already see him trim. “I’ll help you. I know how to lose weight. Remember how quickly I lost my pregnancy weight? How I got right back to my size?”

  Sometimes she bought suits for him that hid some of his weight, clothes that made people at the clinic ask if he was getting thinner. But thin never felt real. He would have loved to have a twentysixinch waist. So he wouldn’t have to be afraid to eat. So he could keep Fatboy away. When he felt good about himself, he’d forget about Fatboy for a while, but other times he felt him close by. Fatboy had taken him over in stores, in the apartments of tenants, in his father’s restaurant, even in bed with Yvonne. But Fatboy had never claimed him at work, though Robert sometimes felt him waiting outside the clinic. In his work Robert felt safe. There, Fatboy could not get him.

  Helene Blau was one of those women who grow beautiful with age, whose features—though never pretty in girlhood—take on a loveliness during the years when many women mourn the passing of their youth. In her sixties, she had finally claimed her body, grown into her shoulders instead of denying their magnificent span. She even moved differently, with a certain harmony and fluidity, comfortable with the space her body took up.
At times this new awareness of herself made her feel almost giddy, extravagant.

  Ready for further changes, she went with Pearl one afternoon to get her gray hair cut to chin length. Bought lipstick in a deep shade of red. Purple tulips. Filled three short glass vases with water, and trimmed the stems so the blossoms were close together, petals of flame-tipped purple, a surface of colors you looked down into, so different from the way she usually arranged flowers, leaving their stems long, their blossoms falling away from each other.

  Stefan noticed her lighter step, that different tilt to her neck as if the grace that had manifested itself in those letters she’d sent him from Germany had now shifted to her body. No longer did she have to endure comparison to his previous wives: they had stayed behind, fading more every year, turning into girls younger than Greta until they had become transparent. What Helene had with him was solid—friendship, esteem. She had learned to balance her love for him with that for her son and grandson; and what was left for Stefan was the right portion, a portion that did not make him uncomfortable.

  Still, there were times when he missed the all-consuming passion she used to center on him. One night he watched her calm face on the pillow next to his, and it stirred him beyond language when she turned toward him in her sleep and—in that moment of turning—reached for the back of her neck as she had for so many years to gather and move her mass of hair along with her body in that one motion of turning. And though her neck was bare now and her hand stayed empty, her body completed that motion without waking.

  After a while, when the pattern of her breath changed, he reached for her wrist and curled his fingers around its width.

  “You can’t sleep?” she asked.

  “What happened to that early love of yours, Lenchen?” he whispered, half expecting her to say she didn’t know what he meant.

  But she knew. Oh, she knew. And was far more familiar with the touch of her own hands. Had preferred it ever since she’d understood that Robert would be her one chance at a child of her own. To mate with any passion seemed frivolous after the knowledge that Stefan would not impregnate her again.

  “Lenchen?” He rubbed two fingers across the soft base of her thumb.

  “You mean the way I used to love you?” she murmured. “Without holding back …?”

  In the dark, he felt the blood racing through every vein in his body as though he were in one of those medical textbook pictures with all his insides exposed, and he felt certain that if he let himself think about the intricacy of that network of veins and nerves and bones for too long, his body would stop working.

  Next to him, Helene was so still that he wondered if, perhaps, she had dozed off. But she laced her strong fingers through his. “Stefan—”

  “Yes?”

  The rustling of sheets and pillows. “Would you really want that again?”

  Yes, he wanted to say, yes, but the truth was that he wasn’t certain. To accept a passion that immense carried far too much responsibility. To ask for it was even more risky. He felt her waiting for his answer. Patiently. Insistently. And felt his eyes forced open with sudden tears. All those years … the waste of all those years I wasn’t with her fully because I grieved for the other two. Even those years with Sara I was grieving for Elizabeth.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “I am not sure,” he said.

  “Forgive me,” he said.

  One afternoon that fall, when Yvonne’s heart felt too generous for her family alone, she offered to help with the packages that Helene sent regularly to her old neighborhood in Germany. Together with Rosalie Perelli and Pearl Bloom, she inserted the leaves in Helene’s mahogany table and spread out items that several of the tenants had dropped off: a lace bed jacket and three pairs of hardly worn shoes from Mrs. Evans; two suits with vests from Buddy Hedge who’d retired from the school; four aprons and a flashlight from Mrs. Perelli. Others in the Wasserburg had contributed canned food and even money that Helene was rolling up tightly and, as usual, hiding in the cores of wooden spools.

  When Yvonne read the thank-you letter that Robert’s cousin Trudi had sent back with lists of what was needed most—flour and rice; dried eggs and dried milk; blankets and clothing; cigarettes to use as currency—she realized how hungry the people in Germany were. Cold and hungry. Although she’d read about that in the papers, it wasn’t the same as finding out from her husband’s German relatives. She began to worry about them, especially Uncle Leo whose knee had gotten worse. Whenever she went to Heflins’, she bought a few special things, not just the basics the German relatives asked for, but smoked sausage, hard lemon candies, powdered chocolate to make that dry milk more appetizing.

  One evening, when she was helping Helene and Pearl with another package, she volunteered to shop for clothes, to find specific sizes and colors—something Pearl acknowledged she was good at.

  But Helene told her, “It’s better to send used clothing.”

  “I think it would be more generous to give them something new.”

  “It isn’t generous if they don’t receive it,” Helene said. “Trudi wrote that things get stolen on the way. Worn clothes have a better chance of getting there.”

  “Why don’t you wrap the gifts,” Pearl encouraged Yvonne. She turned to Helene. “You’ve seen what Yvonne can do with a piece of leftover wallpaper and some yarn. She makes the most gorgeous gift boxes.”

  “I can do that,” Yvonne said, pleased. “I can also—”

  “Anything wrapped like that,” Helene interrupted, “will look new.”

  Yvonne glared at her mother-in-law. Always adding her gloom. Her German gloom.

  “But you could sew for them,” Helene offered.

  Yvonne hesitated.

  “I’ll help,” Helene said. “If you show me what to do.”

  That week, she and Yvonne sewed a cherry-red blouse for the midwife in Burgdorf from the lining of Nate Bloom’s old coat; a bathrobe for Stefan’s mother cut from the Staneks’ blue towels that had frayed around the edges but otherwise were still good; four striped silk ties from one of Mrs. Klein’s skirts. At first it felt odd to Yvonne to be teaching her mother-in-law anything, but Helene accepted instruction so willingly that Yvonne enjoyed working with her, patient if a seam needed to be undone, praising her when she completed something.

  As Caleb turned from Yvonne’s breast and that very first bone-aching need, she lost the fascination that had bonded her to him. It was her yearning for that intensity and for that status of early motherhood—not for another child—that led to her next pregnancy. But Emma, born two years after Caleb, was not the serene child Yvonne had envisioned. A stocky and red-faced infant who’d fight sleep until she was exhausted from crying, she would clutch her mother’s hair or breast, trying to force her into merging with her once again, making the journey back to that fusion of blood and flesh.

  Though Yvonne would try to soothe her, she’d usually end up pulling herself free from this daughter who tugged at her nipple and depleted her instead of filling her with contentment. Some days she felt so afraid of Emma’s fierce needs that she’d yearn to lash out at her. But she’d make herself turn from the red-screaming face because she was not about to hurt her child. Though I want to. Oh how I want to. Never the boy, though. Never Caleb. Beating your child bloody-blue did not fit into the way Yvonne saw herself as a mother, did not fit the image of herself bending over a happily gurgling child, satisfying and calming that child with her presence alone, smiling while her dark blue hair—shining, always shining—emphasizes her pale profile….

  But the child she pictured had no resemblance to Emma, who would tear at your hair if you ever were to let it hang close enough to those greedy fists. To divert that urge of hurting Emma, Yvonne would break a plate or tear a newspaper. Usually that would settle her. And if not, she knew how to stop from harming her daughter by bringing the hurt to her own skin. By spilling hot coffee on herself. Or beating her hands against the tiled wall of the bathroom. Sometimes she
stood in front of the stove, watched the wide coils of the right front burner redden, and imagined pressing her palms against that slow glow. But she always stopped there. Because if she did, Robert would notice. And who would bathe Caleb? Change Emma’s diapers? Easier to cut the insides of her upper arms. Move the paring knife through soft, pale flesh till she felt calm. Hidden beneath sleeves in the day. By the dark at night. Robert made love in the dark, ashamed of his body. Believing her body to be so perfect. How little he knew of her.

  To make up to Emma for that rush of destruction that Yvonne never let her see but that the child, nonetheless, could feel behind the strained smile, Yvonne would flood her with affection, confusing her. But at least I’ve never hurt my babies. It gave Yvonne some comfort to remind herself that. And brought back the sensation of being small and flying at her parents’ bedroom door as they lock it against her—too late, she’s always too late—beating her hands against their door till all she becomes is the wing-beat of her hands, such ugly hands, the slap and flutter that drown all other sounds.

  What terrified her most about being a parent was that you never knew which of your actions would affect your children for life. And because she wanted them to remember her as lighthearted and loving, she would dance with them around the apartment, take them hiking or skiing or swimming, depending on the season. She’d build kites for them from narrow slats of wood and half-transparent paper—green or blue or red—making the tail by tying bows of tissue paper and spacing them five inches apart along the length of twine, enchanting Caleb and Emma with her playfulness so much so that, sometimes, it all would become real.

  But never for long. Then she’d pass the children along to Robert. And so Emma and Caleb both switched parents: from their mother during that initial season of need—their need as well as hers—to their father, steady and kind and large, who could lift anything with his strong arms, who made music for them with fast-flying fingers, who always had stories and sweets for them when he’d tuck them in at night, who knew that Caleb liked to fall asleep with the light on, and that Emma needed more blankets in the evening, when her skin felt cold, than in the morning because she’d only throw them off once she had warmed herself with sleep.