by Hegi, Ursula
But it was obvious that the tenants didn’t think she was ill: she could tell by their questions about her health that they saw her as a spoiled woman, a useless woman. Just because her suffering did not disfigure her, they assumed she was pretending. They’d probably picked up that attitude from her mother-in-law. Not that Helene ever said anything like that—no, she was helpful, showing off her hard work just to make Yvonne feel useless.
But Robert understood. Yvonne was sure because she could feel it in his hands when he massaged her back. Now, that pain had freed her from excuses for not having sex with him, she felt eased by his caresses and could be tender without worrying that he might want more of her.
Robert found that once she had something to look forward to—holidays and family vacations—her back would get stronger for a while. The summer the children were thirteen and eleven, he suggested renting a cabin in Rye Beach where he and Yvonne had spent their honeymoon.
“I’ll be glad to come along to take care of the children and the cooking,” his mother offered.
“That would be wonderful,” he said.
Yvonne was too angry to say anything until she was alone with him. “I’m tired of German cooking. Tired of that old German woman running my life.” And yet, even as she was saying this, she was thinking how her children were half German, and how she always felt she had to protect them because of that very Germanness, and how odd it felt that they had come from her body, though she wasn’t German while part of them was.
Robert looked dazed. “But my mother’s been helping us so much.”
“That’s just it.”
“The children, they liked the idea too. And without her—I don’t know how we’d manage.”
“It’s hard enough that we have to accept her help the rest of the year, but our vacation is so short that I want to enjoy it with my own family.”
“She is our family.”
“I’m talking about my husband. My son. My daughter.”
By now, Yvonne was feeling so ashamed that she refused to talk about it anymore. But it took her till the following evening to admit to Robert that she was sorry for what she’d said about his mother. “She’s so generous with her help. And I do appreciate her. You know that. And if it’s important to you that she comes along, it’s all right with me too.”
“I already said no to her.”
“I’m sorry. I really am.”
“So am I.” He told her he’d phoned his mother from the clinic because he didn’t know how to look at her face once he told her. “Of course,” his mother had said, “families belong together.” And when he’d apologized, she’d interrupted him. “Do you have any idea how many times I used to wish it were just you and me and your father? I never got that.” He’d felt a sudden and deeper comprehension of her distance from Greta and Tobias, and how—by loving him better—she had kept them separate from herself. From him too. More than once, while sitting on her knees, he’d sensed Tobias’ jealousy, Greta’s sadness, but above all, his mother’s resentment of those two. “I wish I’d had Yvonne’s courage back then,” she’d said to him. “Enjoy being with your family. That’s how it should be.”
Though Robert ended up with the cooking and laundry, the vacation was the best he’d had with Yvonne and his children. Their cottage was right on the beach. The first day, his children gathered pocketfuls of shells, and when Yvonne suggested they keep only the perfect ones, Emma still hoarded everything she collected, while Caleb only held on to eleven shells that he lined up on the windowsills in the cottage. The others he threw back into the ocean, picturing the waves carrying them ashore further down the beach where a girl would find them. A girl with long, bare legs. And as she touches them, she knows they’re mine and comes searching for me. While Caleb waited for this girl, he returned his best shells to the sea for her. Emma cried when he tossed his largest shell into the waters. Its outside was crusted, while inside it shimmered pink and white like a mother-of-pearl hairbrush.
Mornings their mother would sun herself on the beach, her yellow swimsuit like sun against her skin, while their father kept himself covered up with baggy shorts and a T-shirt to hide his white belly, even when he went swimming. Caleb liked to swim with him because, in the water, his father was fast and agile; but he didn’t like going for walks with him. It was embarrassing, the way his father’s body jiggled. And it was even more embarrassing to hear him cough after dinner in the bathroom. On Caleb’s last birthday, when he’d been about to go searching for his father after they’d eaten cake, Pearl Bloom had taken him by the arm. “It’s best to leave your father alone right now,” she’d whispered.
The last day in Rye Beach, Caleb got up at dawn to swim before the beach became crowded. When the sun was half above the line that split water from sky, his mother walked from the cabin and brought him the green kite they’d built together. She held the flat piece of wood with the string wound around it, letting it out as Caleb walked with the kite toward the jetty, where the rocks were smooth and sunbaked beneath his bare feet.
“Now!” she shouted when he reached the largest boulder.
He tossed the kite up, and she ran along the beach, hair flying around her shoulders as she glanced back toward the kite. Jerkily, it rose, then straightened, and she let out more line till it soared, a green diamond in the sun. She handed the string to Caleb, and he walked backwards with it, eyes on the kite. When the line slackened, he ran, pulling it tighter. A wave snagged his mother’s feet, and as she laughed, Caleb wished she could be like that every day. While the kite wavered, she hurried toward where it was about to topple down. Caleb wound up the string, and she held the kite until he was done. Then she tossed it into the air, and he ran with the kite until, once again, it stood high above them, tail fluttering in the wind.
When Robert stepped from the cottage and saw his wife’s body moving with an ease it hadn’t shown in years, he was seized by the dread that, once again, she would leave him behind, and all at once he wondered if she’d ever really had lovers. What if she’d told him her fantasies as if they were real? After all, she liked to flirt, not have sex. No. Those other men had been real, so real he’d felt them in bed with him and Yvonne. Still, he wished she would tell him it had never come to anything, that she had merely traveled with someone for a week, say, or a few days.
Even more so, he wished he could take that for the truth.
When they arrived back home the following afternoon, he urged her to rest while he and the children unloaded the car.
“I am more exhausted than I realized,” she said when he helped her into bed and brought her a glass of grape juice.
By morning he was glad he’d taken that precaution, because she mentioned a tightness in her back, and within a few days she spent most of her hours in bed once again, lovely in one of her peignoir sets.
The closest Yvonne could come to admitting her regret for excluding Helene from the vacation was to ask her if she could teach her some German recipes. Some afternoons Helene would invite her upstairs where she’d position her on the corner bench with pillows that supported her back, and let her watch while she prepared Kalbsrouladen and Apfelmus, Schnitzel and Rotkohl. Though Yvonne took notes and asked questions, she never made those recipes. Still, she knew it pleased Robert that she was trying to learn from his mother.
One morning, as he sliced a Bosc pear into paper-thin rounds and arranged them in a fan on a white plate for her, he felt certain that he had brought on her illness by wanting her home with him. Instantly he felt ashamed. And yet he knew that he would choose illness for her again if it were to stop her from leaving. Between them, now, there was not much room for anyone else: so focused were they both on this illness that Yvonne had given birth to as if it were their third child—coddling it, conferring over it—that they would only half-listen to Caleb and Emma. While Caleb was content to spin dream pictures inside his head, Emma withdrew into the old sorrow: Opa. The familiar sorrow that every new loss evoked for her: Opa
. But at least she’d learned how to calm herself by moving deeper into the house Opa had built—for me he built it, for me alone—by breathing its many scents, by retreating into the warm boiler room, or looking from a window at the familiar landscape.
They all came together for the celebration of Helene’s eightieth birthday: Greta and Noah Creed on the train as usual, though—according to Mrs. Perelli—they could have afforded a limousine from Boston; Tobias driving up from Hartford in his white convertible; Robert taking the elevator one floor up with his children and Yvonne, whose strapless chiffon gown with its glitter of sequins was too elegant for the occasion.
Dr. Miles brought his wife, Laura, and their little daughter who was just learning to walk; and Pearl Bloom was followed by Fanny Braddock who’d been living with her ever since her mother had died. For years before that, Fanny had kept house for Pearl, and she liked living there now every day because Pearl didn’t get angry at her the way her mother used to when she smiled at men.
While Pearl and Greta helped Helene to finish the elaborate meal she’d been cooking, Yvonne rested with her back against the warm tiles of the Kachelofen. She felt shut out by the three women, felt disappointed that Helene had thanked her without enthusiasm for the cashmere shawl she had chosen so carefully for her. Emerald to match Helene’s necklace, the only color she wore to offset her black clothes. Three different catalogs Yvonne had checked, and she’d sent the first two shawls back because the green had not been the right shade.
“Can I try it?” Pearl had asked while Helene was still opening the beautifully wrapped package, and Helene had nodded and said, “Of course,” without trying it on herself. Rude, Yvonne thought. Both of them. Rude. Worse yet that Pearl—who’d started wearing blonde wigs when Stanley Poggs had moved out on her—still had the shawl around her shoulders. She’d probably forget to take it off. Get food stains on it. And, just as with everything else she borrowed, forget that the shawl wasn’t hers.
She heard Robert in the living room, opening the piano, and she closed her eyes, willed herself to move into the solace that he always found in his music, and soon she was with him, closer than if he’d sat by her side.
Tobias lifted the lid from a pot of Gulasch. “This smells so good.”
But Helene didn’t acknowledge him. “Pearl?” she said. “Will you taste that gravy for me?”
“Why don’t you let Tobias?” Pearl glanced at Tobias who stood by the stove, shoulders wide and bony beneath his starched shirt, eyes alert, injured. “He’s got excellent taste,” she said, though she knew that Helene wouldn’t want his help. It was like that between them when he visited. Still, what Pearl admired was that he always tried to approach Helene, though she’d been distant with him ever since his father’s funeral six years ago.
“Let me know if the Gulasch needs any more Paprika,” Helene told her.
“We all trust your tasting skills, Aunt Pearl,” Tobias said. But his eyes stayed on his stepmother, who had never spoken to him about the funeral. At the time it had felt too soon to burden her with his reasons for not coming to his father’s bedside or to the cemetery. Still, he’d felt certain she would understand once he told her how that promise to himself had come about. I won’t come to your funeral. Yet some days he still wondered if he should have broken that promise. To stay away had been more of a struggle than he’d expected. For months afterwards he’d felt edgy whenever he’d thought about approaching his stepmother, and he’d stalled, convincing himself it was too soon. While all along the chill between them had grown. Until too much time had passed to bring it up. With her or with Greta and Robert. Even with Danny, though sometimes he wanted to ask him what it had been like at his father’s funeral.
“Let’s use the larger bowls, Pearl,” his stepmother was saying. She never refused his visits when he came to her on his trips to see Danny, and she’d even told him she’d let him know if she found the old notebook with the legends his mother had written down.
“Can you pour the water off those Knödel, Greta?”
He wished he were in the garage with Danny. Soon, he thought. Soon.
Steam rose into Greta’s face as she drained the Knödel. But despite the steam, she felt cold. Breathe, she told herself. Breathe slowly. The air felt flimsy as though she were standing at a high al titude. For the past week she hadn’t slept well, dreams darkened by images of a quarter moon too dim to sustain its reflection, and she’d awakened each morning with the dread that something was about to happen to Helene. When she’d told Noah, he’d said to expect death at her stepmother’s age was natural; but what Greta sensed was more complicated than death, something that was to affect the entire family, and she observed Helene closely for any sign of illness, although she moved through the preparations for her birthday dinner with her usual ease.
After Noah and Robert inserted both leaves in the mahogany table and they all sat down to eat, Helene felt a sense of strangeness and belonging all at once. Stefan should be here. They’re his. Especially Emma. She looked across the table at her granddaughter. There was something about her that Helene felt in herself too, the kind of solidity that held things together—families; houses; one’s soul. Emma would not turn into a thin wire like her mother.
As Emma felt her Oma watching her so gravely, she smiled, and when Oma smiled back, Emma felt all grown up. And she was. Twelve, she was twelve, and she liked sitting at the table between Aunt Greta and Uncle Noah. Even after they’d married, Uncle Noah had refused to stop being a priest. Some said he wasn’t a real priest—because how could he, a married man?—but he liked to talk about how being married only made him a better priest. “It gives me more compassion,” he’d say. But the bishop didn’t agree. He’d taken away Uncle Noah’s parish and vestments. And he didn’t like it one bit that Uncle Noah held mass at his own house. Emma liked visiting there because sleeping at Uncle Noah’s house was like sleeping in church without getting into trouble. He and Aunt Greta had turned the largest of their five bedrooms—right next to the little room where Emma usually got to sleep—into a chapel with a plain wooden altar, lots of candles, and chairs much softer than church benches.
They ate the German delicacies Helene had enjoyed cooking and baking for weeks, and they toasted to her health and many more years, not knowing that in the early morning hours she would let go of all breath. Gently, they teased her with stories that were older than some of the people around her table but had been told and retold so many times that they had shifted, losing some details while gathering others: how Helene had mistaken those little boys playing football for hunchbacks and had called the hospital; how she’d thanked the Evanses for their awful, sweet chocolates, and they’d brought her a box every year from that day on; how she’d lit real wax candles on her first American Christmas tree and had set the curtains ablaze; and how she’d married her husband within two hours of his proposal….
“It was not quite like that,” she’d protest now and again, but she’d be laughing.
Robert was humming, forgetting himself within the pleasures of taste, but Yvonne frowned as he pressed one thumb against the crumbs on the tablecloth, licked it off while his eyes followed a slice of Sauerbraten on the way to his brother’s plate. When he leaned forward to help himself to another serving of the sour-sweet beef, he glanced at Tobias’ plate, measuring the size of their servings against each other.
“Are you going to finish your Knödel, Yvonne?”
Embarrassed by his appetite, she snapped, “Take it.”
“Thank you.” He ate her Knödel, raised his napkin to his lips, and then reached for both her hands—blue and cold as they often were—to warm them between his own.
It moved and saddened her, his tender acceptance of those hands she hated. Moved and saddened her because she could not do the same for him, could not shed her disgust at his size. Though he wasn’t quite as huge as he used to be, she had her suspicions though she’d rather not think about him in the bathroom with the water runnin
g, about the red in his eyes when he came back out, the sour breath beneath the smell of toothpaste. She felt certain he lied to her about food, that he ate far more than he let her see, that he kept snacks hidden at the office. Why couldn’t he just stop after one sandwich? One piece of cake? How often had she seen him fluctuate between fasting and eating? Once he had one bite, it was as though a dam had split open.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
“You’re looking at me.”
“That’s why I married you.” She nestled her fingers in his, warm now, warm. “So I can look at you. So I won’t have to go to your mother and ask her permission to look at her son.”
He laughed. “I see.”
“Part of New Hampshire marriage law. That you can look at your spouse for six hours every day.”
“Six hours?”
“Seven if you apply for an extension. The same goes for dancing, as you well know.”
“And where do we go to apply?”
As Helene followed the light banter between them, she felt glad for Robert. At least they have that between them. That and Robert’s music. She also felt tired. Probably from all the cooking. The talking. Getting a room ready for Tobias.
A hand on her arm. Pearl’s. “Lie down for a while.”
She hesitated.
“I’ll make sure we keep celebrating. Go.”
When Helene lay down on her bed, she left her black shoes on, and as she gazed at the sturdy leather far away there at the end of her legs, at the shoelaces winding into five sets of holes, at the tiny perforations forming the shape of a bow, she thought of the shoes Yvonne liked to wear—airy straps and thin heels—and wished she’d owned some herself. I would have broken both legs in them. Not if I’d learned early. Still… Greta would have been happier as a girl wearing those. All at once she felt a terrible sadness that she hadn’t bought Greta shoes like that. Tears dripped from her cheeks into her ears as she thought of Greta rebelling against those solid shoes she had ordered from Germany. It hadn’t been all that important to make the children obey. If she could do it again, she would let up on that. Just let up. If only she had been kinder. Less strict with Tobias. Suddenly it all seemed to be about shoes, the way things with her stepchildren had gone. She saw Greta at twelve in Yvonne’s silver sandals, running up the steps to the front door of the Wasserburg, laughing. And I’m following her. Surefooted on red heels that are even higher—but the picture wouldn’t hold for long. Wobbled. Helene laughed. Because I’m the sensible shoe type. Tobias— Stop it. Still, there he is, prancing around on four-inch heels—that kind of man, though how can I know for sure?—prancing and clicking his fingers as if summoning her. And there’s Leo, applauding while Margret plays Manfred and I play Lieselotte, stalking around on high heels and whisking the pregnancy pillow from beneath my dress for Leo to catch and return to me for yet another pregnancy that Manfred discovers with great dismay. “Lieselotte?!” While I raise my veil to confess, “Ja, Manfred.” Dozens of pregnancies. Hundreds of pregnancies, all counted.