by Hegi, Ursula
While I’ve only had the one. Robert—
Robert. Knocking at her door and coming in without asking. Bringing Emma and the lanky doctor who sat right down on the edge of her bed as though he were Manfred and she Lieselotte.
She giggled as he reached for her wrist. “Ja, Manfred.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“That’s something I’m not, for sure. Not even with a pillow. I’ve only had the one.”
“Your son—”
“He’s all Stefan would let me have.”
“Your son thought—”
“Why are you here?”
Sweet pipe tobacco on his breath. “Your son thought it would be good if I checked in on you. All this excitement today …”
“I’ve handled worse in eighty years.” She patted the other edge of her bed, motioned for Emma to sit there.
“Congratulations.” Fingers still on her wrist, the doctor tilted his head as if listening to her pulse beat from far away. Chin with a pinprick dimple. Hands narrower than mine. Doesn’t take much for that.
“Ja, Manfred.”
He turned to Robert. “I want your mother to rest tomorrow. At her age, it’s sometimes good to spend an entire day in bed.”
“Wait,” Helene said.
But he didn’t hear because he was asking Robert questions about her health as though she were too feeble to answer him.
“You—” She pushed herself up on her elbows. “You are here because of me.”
“Mother?” Robert sounded uncomfortable. “Dr. Miles didn’t mean—”
“My body—when you talk about my body, you must talk to me.”
“Your mother is absolutely right,” the doctor said to Robert.
“To me. You’re still not talking to me.”
Emma leaned toward her Oma, fascinated and proud. I want to be like that.
“I apologize. I really do. I won’t let that happen again.”
“Where I grew up, the old were honored. Not in this country. Especially old women—they become so transparent that you don’t even see their windpipes.”
“Windpipes?”
“Windpipes and hearts.”
“You are honored here,” Robert said urgently. “With us.”
“You need rest.” The doctor looked straight at her. Black eyebrows a shade darker than his hair. “If today were not such an important day for you, I’d ask you to stay in bed. But given the cause for celebration, I know you’d get up anyhow to be with your guests.”
“You don’t know.”
He turned to Robert. “I wish all my patients had your mother’s independence. Actually—” He covered his mouth. “I did it again.”
“You did.” Emma nodded.
“Mrs. Blau, I wish all my patients had your independence.”
“I have independence too,” Emma said. “And I’m one of your patients. So you have at least two patients who have independence, my Oma and me.”
“Dr. Miles probably wants to get back to his family,” her father said.
“You don’t know what he wants.”
“Emma—”
But Dr. Miles laughed. “In fact, I’m enjoying the view from this room. I didn’t know there was a view like that anywhere in this town.”
“It’s even better from the roof,” Emma said. “I’ll take you there.”
When he wavered, Helene could tell he was the kind of man who didn’t know how to say no, the kind of man who’d then extract himself through passivity. She could have rescued him from Emma, but it seemed only just to leave him to her.
“Do you want to see our best view?” Emma persisted.
That wonderful stubbornness. Helene smiled to herself.
“If your grandma and dad don’t mind.”
“As long as she doesn’t go close to the edge,” Robert said.
“Careful,” Helene said, and it seemed that before she had finished that one word she was alone once again. Where are they? From tears to laughter to rage. No dividers between all those feelings. Spilling across. She wanted to reach down and take off her shoes, but it seemed like too much of an effort: they would be too heavy, too cumbersome to put back on. Just the thought of unlacing and then lacing them once again … Too much. She thought of the years when taking care of her stepchildren had often been too much for her, when there had never been enough left for Robert. Or for myself. As well as she could, she had loved these children who were not hers. And still loved them now. Even Tobias. She had done what she could for them. No more. She saw Dr. Miles following Emma to the china cabinet, saw Emma reaching behind the old pewter cups for the key to the roof. They walk down the hallway, unlock the metal door to the roof and the cool housing of the elevator, voices echoing as they climb the steps into the scents of stone and dust and oil where Emma has gone so often with Stefan.
Stefan? Helene felt exhausted as if she had climbed those stairs to the roof along with Stefan and Emma; yet, it was the kind of tiredness that allowed for only one kind of encounter with sleep—struggle. As soon as she won that struggle and felt herself drifting toward warm and familiar forgetfulness, she got scared because she felt too far from the place where she had started out as a child. What would her life in America have been like if she’d arrived from a country she wouldn’t feel ashamed to name as the place she’d come from? She closed her eyes; tried to fight her way back into sleep; but was distracted by the sound of squirrels scampering across the roof. All at once she felt pushed. Greta pushing at her to make an appointment to get a physical; Tobias pushing at her to search for his mother’s notebook, pushing at her just by being here today with his soul full of resentment, with that sharpness in his features. Like the great vultures of the earth. Pushing at her to do it now, whatever it was they wanted. Now.
No more, she thought. No more. And was right back to all those times when she had resented the American children, when she would have liked to be only with her husband and child, when she had still assumed that she would have more children. But you only allowed me the one. She felt it again then, that pain of Stefan’s betrayal, as devastating as it had been the night she had first understood that he’d married her for the sake of his children, the night she had forced him to relinquish his seed. Relinquish the child I had to steal from you. With more children of her own she would have been a gentler mother to his American children. She could still feel it, her failure of not having been enough for them. And she hadn’t even been able to look after all of Robert’s needs because one or the other of them had always wanted her. But now I can. Can take care of my son.
It was long after midnight when she got up and took her white stationery from the rosewood desk, and as she wrote her will, leaving everything to Robert, she felt the presence of the biter—so let it be then, let it—smelled the sweet-sour scent of Sauerbraten, and was drawn into an afternoon more than four decades earlier when she’d sunk to the kitchen floor, terrified that the one child who would ever inhabit her womb was about to bleed from her. She recalled Greta crouching by her side, recalled the touch of her small hands, and felt ill knowing how close she had come that day to losing Robert. She wanted to give Greta something of equal worth, but because that was impossible, and because she could not bear to give her anything that would deprive Robert, she wrote down that Greta’s apartment would be rent-free for as long as she was alive. Not that she used it that often now that she was married to her priest. Just when she visited. But it was hers. The one who really deserved something from her was the girl whose life she’d offered up for that of her son. The necklace. Not that it would ever undo what she’d taken from Trudi. But she wrote it down: my emerald necklace to my brother’s daughter, Trudi Montag.
It was almost three when she rang the bell to Pearl’s apartment and, without explaining herself, asked Pearl to witness her signature.
“A hard night to sleep,” Pearl said as she let her in. “For me too,” she added, watching her friend closely.
“Wait till you’r
e eighty.”
“Let me turn seventy first. Please.” Without the wig, Pearl’s head was small, childlike almost with her residue of gray hair and stringy neck. She motioned to the cashmere shawl she’d wrapped around the shoulders of her nightgown. “Do you want this? Are you cold?”
“No.”
“I used to think I was so different from others in the building, so much younger, more adventurous…. And now look at me. What I am is one of many old people who live in this house.”
“A child.” Helene smiled. “You’re just a child.”
“Quite often I feel all of twelve.”
“Quite often you act all of twelve.”
“Thank you. And it doesn’t even take effort.”
They sat down at the marble-top table in Pearl’s dining room, shadowed by the greenhouse plants and the night beyond the glass.
“How about you?” Pearl asked. “Your real age… inside of you.”
“I have always been old.”
“No, you’re not.”
“I like being old. It’s easier. Besides, it’s what people say about me. Some days though … on my best days …”
“Yes?”
“… I’m thirty-five, the age I was when Robert was born. It was my best year, Pearl.”
“You were beautiful.”
“I had what I wanted.”
Two raps—come to the window; one rap—open the dumbwaiter. It came like a chant to Pearl. Moved her to tears that she’d ever had that kind of friendship. Two raps—to the window; one—to the dumbwaiter. All at once she felt afraid. She tried to laugh it away. “Remember how we used to bang against the steam pipes to send messages to each other?”
“You made this place home to me. Pearl—”
“Yes?”
“About me coming from Germany and—”
“You didn’t live there when any of it was happening.”
“Still. It’s where I come from. Sometimes I wonder what I would have done if I’d stayed over there.”
“I never thought about you that way.”
“Nate did. I wish I had told him how sorry I am. It’s just that I didn’t know how to say it, or if I even had the right to say it.”
Pearl leaned forward. “Why now?”
“Can we do this?” Helene smoothed the pages of the will that was to make up for every harsh word she’d spoken to Robert when she’d felt drained by the older children, make up for the brothers and sisters she’d deprived him of because her husband had believed he’d fathered enough children. His American children— “His American children,” she said aloud.
“If you like, we can wait till morning.”
“No.” Helene seized the fountain pen. “Keep this safe for me,” she said and set her signature in blue ink to the paper that left everything—except her necklace—to the son who had issued from that one night’s sweet struggle. Let it be yours, Robert. It’s only right. And as she watched Pearl sign her name beneath hers, she was overtaken by relief and exhaustion.
“She was calm,” Pearl would tell Helene’s family the next day and, again, three days later at her funeral. “She was calm.”
Standing by the wide grave that also contained her Opa, Emma looked at his name, last for now on the gravestone:
STEFAN BLAU 1881-1953
Above him on the granite was the name of his daughter, Agnes, who had died in 1910 after living only one year and one month; and above Agnes were the names of Opa’s other wives. Emma felt outraged that they had to lie beneath the ground, outraged that her Oma was about to be placed there in the dark with them. But at least she hadn’t killed Oma with her weight. “She’ll be the death of you,” Oma had told Opa, but he’d only laughed and bounced Emma on his knees.
She’ll be the death of you.
From nearby came the sound of the Brook-that-finishes-grieving—a sound like that of a very strong wind—and as Emma raised her head, she noticed how the mountains across the gray lake had a sense of stability about them, of eternity that was in odd contrast to the lives of all who had walked up here for Oma’s funeral, all so fragile. And yet, seeing these mountains made it seem almost possible that humans, too, could be forever. And perhaps they were, once they lay buried and became part of this hillside where she stood, became part of the undergrowth that had sprung from the pulpy trunks of fallen trees and gave off scents of decay and recent growth.
When Dr. Miles and his wife came to the Wasserburg for the funeral lunch, they stood with her by a window and watched as darkening clouds raced across the hazy sun, watched as a swarm of birds was blown sideways against the sky. Instead of scattering, the birds moved into a tighter formation that looked like a dirty sail. Then, all at once, filaments of water linked the lake to the sky. Emma hoped that, once it cleared, the doctor would climb on the roof with her again and let her show him around as he had a few days earlier on Oma’s birthday; but it was still raining when he and his wife got their coats.
“Our daughter Amy gets scared of storms,” Mrs. Miles told Emma’s father. “She’s staying with our neighbor.”
Late that afternoon, when only Helene’s family was left, Pearl Bloom brought out the copy she had made of Helene’s will and read it aloud.
Emma could see that her father was stunned. “I didn’t know,” he kept saying. “I truly didn’t.”
“Your mother cheated Greta and me,” Uncle Tobias said.
“I’m sure she didn’t intend anything like that.”
“I agree with Robert,” Aunt Greta said.
“Helene gave a lot to you,” Pearl Bloom reminded Uncle Tobias.
But he shook his head. “And now she’s taking a lot from us. That house should belong to all of us.”
All of us? Does that mean me? Emma wanted to ask, but when she glanced at her brother who stood by the window with her, he tapped one finger against her lips to stay quiet so that the grownups wouldn’t tell them to run along and find something to do.
“I’m not ready to even think about a will,” her father said.
“Why should you?” Uncle Tobias said. “Given that she’s left it all to you.”
“That’s not why.”
“Everything I ever got, I got from strangers.”
Emma frowned at Caleb. What had Uncle Tobias gotten from strangers?
“Give me time,” her father was saying.
Aunt Greta nodded. “Maybe what you can do in the meantime is share the income from the rent. Until you sell the house.”
“But that would be against my mother’s wishes.”
“It was built before your mother stepped off the boat,” Uncle Tobias reminded him. “Built with money from Greta’s grandparents. With hard work from my mother. I’m going to check this out with a lawyer.”
“Give me time to think,” Emma’s father said. “Please.”
“One solution,” Aunt Greta said, “would be to give equal shares of the building to us. We’d each own one third.”
Equal shares of three. Emma thought it was the kind of idea Opa would have liked—one third to each of his children: Aunt Greta, Uncle Tobias, and her father. That’s how she would divide the house. And then they’d all live here. It was what she and Caleb whispered about by the window, promising each other that they’d never fight about the house the way their father and Uncle Tobias and Aunt Greta were fighting about it.
“But then what if you or Tobias decide to sell?” their father was asking Aunt Greta.
Emma stared at Caleb. “Can they? Are they allowed to sell the house?”
“It’s supposed to stay together,” their father said as if he’d heard them, though he was still talking to Aunt Greta.
“Keeping the house together will destroy it and drive this family apart,” Uncle Tobias warned.
“It sounds like you’re putting a curse on it,” Emma’s father protested.
“It was cursed before I was born. You tell him, Greta. Tell him about your grandparents’ money.”
She looked un
easy. “He borrowed from them. For the house. Without paying any of it back.”
“Tell him what your Grandma Flynn said.”
Greta hesitated. “Not to trust him in matters of money.”
“But I never asked my mother to give it all to me,” Emma’s father said.
“Of course you didn’t,” Pearl Bloom said quickly.
Uncle Tobias turned to her. “But it does not take away the responsibility of what Robert needs to do with it now, and he—”
Emma’s mother interrupted him. “Don’t push him like that, Tobias.”
“All we’re asking,” Aunt Greta said gently, “is that you rectify it.”
“I will.”
“Good.” She stood up, took her handbag from the top of the piano, and wrote out a check. “In the meantime I’ll give you my rent for this month. Here.”
“But it says in the will that your apartment is free.”