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

  “I can’t have an advantage over Tobias.”

  “I want to work something out. Something that respects my mother’s wishes.”

  “Oh please,” Uncle Tobias said. “Don’t hide behind her the way you did when you were three.”

  “I’ll find a way to make things just.”

  That night, Yvonne opened her arms to Robert, but he didn’t want her solace: he wanted to be alone so he could eat. When, finally, she was sleeping, he got up and ate till there was only the shame and, afterwards, the release of it all in the downward swirl of water. In his grieving for his mother, he withdrew from Tobias and Greta. He didn’t understand how they could think of money so soon after his mother’s death, and he felt hurt when Tobias told him the will was invalid because it required three witnesses, not just one. But when Tobias checked with a lawyer about contesting the will on that basis, he was told that when a widow dies without a valid will, her property goes to the widow’s children—not her stepchildren.

  Soon, Robert believed, he would figure out how to deal with the will. To appease his siblings, Yvonne suggested he send them expensive presents—a leather briefcase for Tobias, a weekend on Nantucket for Greta and Noah; but his brother returned the package unopened, while his sister never mentioned his gift.

  “They’re not trying,” Yvonne said. “They’re not even trying.”

  Whenever Robert let himself think about the will, it was with confusion and anger that his mother had saddled him with his father’s request to keep the house together. With one more chance to disappoint his father. The few times he felt content were when he sat down at the piano; but that didn’t happen often enough because his days would fold on each other so quickly that he always felt he was losing something. After a full day at the clinic, it felt selfish to play the piano when there was so much work to do on the house. Some day soon, he told himself, he would find a way to divide the inheritance without having to sell the house. Meanwhile, he didn’t deposit the rent checks Greta insisted on sending him.

  Since he couldn’t bear to sort out his mother’s belongings, her apartment stayed vacant for two years, though he could have used the rental income, not just for his family, but also to maintain the building since Danny Wilson was always at him with an ever-lengthening list of repairs. Robert kept her keys in a kitchen drawer with all the other keys for the building, unaware that—quite often —Emma would let herself into her Oma’s apartment, compelled to search, to touch her Oma’s belongings until she was right back in her Opa’s life.

  Some evenings Yvonne would urge Robert to play the piano, and he’d do it for her. Invariably then, as his hands proved to him that the music would always be there for him if he let it, he felt himself yielding to its current—sometimes turbulent; sometimes calming— as it spilled him back into himself.

  Once, after he raised his fingers from the keys, it seemed possible that, with the right words, he would be able to reach Tobias and Greta. “We’ll work this out,” he wrote to both. “Just be patient with me. Please.”

  “I know your intentions are good,” Greta told him on the phone. “But it’s not enough.”

  “Write to me once you have facts,” was Tobias’ answer. “Right now, I give no weight to your words.”

  From Danny, Tobias knew that his brother was making foolish deals with tenants, letting them break through walls, enlarging some apartments by robbing another room or two from adjoining apartments, making those difficult to rent.

  Ever since Tobias had stopped coming to Winnipesaukee, Danny had made the trip to Hartford. “Your brother cares more about animals,” Danny told him one Sunday morning, “than he cares about the house. If you add his lack of business sense to his generosity, you’ve got a mess.”

  “It’s too much for him. Working at his clinic all day and then trying to maintain the house.”

  “The ones I feel sorry for are the kids because they don’t get much from either parent. Emma, she likes to sneak into her grandma’s apartment. Stays there for hours.”

  The day before each of Danny’s visits, Tobias would shop for fresh fruits and seafood, for beeswax candles and imported wines, for the long, skinny chocolate wafers Danny enjoyed. Sometimes, when he’d look at Danny next to him in bed, he not only saw his graceful neck and sinewy body, but also the reflection of Greta’s hair red on the water, her palm on the chest of the priest, and marveled that both he and Greta had ended up with the men they had first touched that very same day.

  He had tried to say that to her once when he’d visited her and Noah in their brownstone in Boston. But she’d shaken her head. “I had no idea how I felt about Noah until much later.”

  “I did.”

  “You were a boy.”

  “I saw you there with him on the lake, and I knew.”

  During one of her raids, Emma found a red cake tin with folded letters behind her Oma’s shoes. When she wrapped it into her cardigan, and smuggled it into her room, she felt calmer than she had in a long time. It was as though something had settled inside her. She didn’t tell Caleb about the letters she kept hidden beneath her bed. At first she honored her grandparents’ privacy by not reading them. All she would let herself do was run her fingers along the handwritten lines; but eventually that only made her so restless that she read them all.

  Lieber Stefan… they started. Or Mein Lieber Stefan …

  Emma still knew enough German to figure out many of the words Oma had written, words that revealed a passion in her practical Oma that amazed Emma. As she imagined Opa reading, she was moved by the longing in those letters, something she had believed you could only feel for someone who was not with you, rather than someone who lived with you day after day. Like the way she still missed Opa. Had missed him at age six and age eight and age twelve. And would continue to miss him. Obviously, he had kept Oma’s letters and read them many times. And obviously, Oma had retrieved them for herself after his death. But where then were the letters he had written in return?

  Periodically, Emma would search for them in her grandparents’ apartment. After it was rented to a dentist and his family, she searched in the basement storage area next to the Perellis’, where a moth-eaten thing that might have been a large goat at one time, or a zebra, was wedged atop two steamer trunks behind the wooden slats and kept its mournful gaze on her.

  Though she didn’t find any letters written by her Opa, she felt certain they had to be hidden somewhere in the Wasserburg, and as she filled the silences between her Oma’s letters with her Opa’s words, she imagined the letters he must have written, and she fabricated a story of the love between her grandparents that was based on assumptions and scant evidence, a story that would shape and distort what she was to believe about love.

  She was still filling in details of that story for herself by the time Caleb left for film school in Los Angeles, and she took the letters with her two years later when she moved into a dorm at the University of New Hampshire. Though it was just an hour’s drive away and close enough to commute, her mother insisted it was important she learn to live away from home.

  Her major was German, the comforting sounds that had come to her in childhood along with English sounds as if they were two branches of the same language. Though it frustrated her that she was far ahead of the other students, their struggle at entering German made her appreciate how hard it must have been for her grandparents to approach English from the other direction when they’d first come into the country. Both had told her about the pleasure they’d felt when, finally, they had learned enough to read without a dictionary.

  Though she liked her classes, she looked forward to her drive home every weekend, especially to that last stretch along the shoreline once she reached the winding road at the southern point of the lake in Alton. From there, she could always feel the Wasserburg pull her back: first she would see it in her mind—built of bricks and higher than any other house in Winnipesaukee—and as she’d turn off toward the lake, she’d first spot the
roofline with the ornate tiles, then the courtyard, the fountain, the French doors to the lobby. From that distance, it was impossible to see the peeling paint around the tall windows, the untended garden, the gradual rot that had been taking hold in the years since her grandmother’s death.

  It disappointed her that Caleb’s visits were so sporadic: he’d either arrive from Los Angeles without warning or cancel plans he’d made months before. And when he was home, he’d usually want to get away to Boston or at least Concord because he didn’t like the films playing at the Royal. Song-and-dance movies, he called them. Even those that didn’t have any music in them. One weekend he took Emma along to Boston, where they stayed with Aunt Greta; but they only saw her and Uncle Noah for breakfast because Caleb dragged Emma from one theater to another. They saw Persona and Stolen Kisses, and Rosemary’s Baby and Viva Maria, Hour of the Wolf and Rachel, Rachel. On the train home, Emma was too exhausted to talk with him about the films. She was thinking about something Aunt Greta had said to her—that her father had a certain blindness when it came to the house. Emma knew he was still trying to convince Uncle Tobias and Aunt Greta that he didn’t think of the house as his alone. And Emma could tell that he really believed it, though no one else did. Uncle Tobias hadn’t spoken to him at all after accusing him of having lied all along about sharing the inheritance.

  It all had become so complicated.

  Her father often fretted about Uncle Tobias and Aunt Greta on Sunday evenings when Emma had dinner with her parents at Opa’s old restaurant before she drove back to school. She usually carried at least half a dozen German novels in her backpack. Occasionally she read German travel books, picturing herself in the open window of a narrow hotel near the Rhein, feeding bread to silver-breasted pigeons or counting the barges go by as her Opa had as a boy. Perhaps she would even spend her honeymoon in Burgdorf. Not that she had anyone in mind. By the end of her junior year she’d only had two boyfriends: the first a studious and shy student much like herself who scared himself the first time he touched her breasts; the second a graduate assistant in her language lab with whom she had sex every day for one entire semester.

  Since she did not miss them when she was away from them, she didn’t know how to define what she felt for them, except that it seemed insignificant compared to the love in her Oma’s letters. She had read them so many times that not a single German word remained unfamiliar. One of her professors, Franz Haufstolz, a Swiss native, praised her for speaking without an accent and encouraged her to consider teaching German. He told her she had a gift for moving right inside a language, and when he recommended the University of Wisconsin for graduate work, it was the only school Emma applied to. However, when she was accepted, she did not tell Professor Haufstolz because she felt unsettled at the thought of living that far away from the Wasserburg.

  1969–1980

  Three weeks before Emma was to graduate from the University of New Hampshire, the secretary of the German department came to the door of her classroom and motioned for her to come out. It was raining when she ran to her car, and what she’d recall afterwards would be fragments of the drive—leaves and wind and rain and the hope that the secretary had misunderstood about her father—but when she reached home, he had already been taken away, and her mother was sitting with Aunt Greta on the sofa, hands on her lap. Blue hands. Still hands.

  “He choked,” she said. “After he finished his breakfast, he choked, Emma. Not at the table. Afterwards, you know … in the bathroom.”

  Emma looked away. Saw the carpet and her aunt’s shoes and the walls and was drawn back to her mother’s face. You used him up. That’s why he died so young.

  Her aunt took off her thick glasses. Stood up and folded Emma into her arms. “I am so very sorry.” Her eyes were puffy.

  “I heard him cough in there,” her mother was saying. “Then— Then he fell, Emma. I heard him fall…”

  Over her aunt’s shoulders, Emma could see the roses on the mantle, white blossoms, long stems, encased by crystal.

  “… first he was coughing, and then there was nothing for a while, and then he fell, and I—”

  They didn’t say what they all knew but never spoke of: that he’d made himself sick on purpose. To keep from getting bigger. The faucet running. Coughing. Eyes red and moist when he’d come out of the bathroom. It embarrassed them almost as much as it used to mortify him.

  “Caleb—” Emma started.

  “On his way.” Aunt Greta sat back down. “He’s flying into Boston. Noah is picking him up.”

  “But he was only fifty-three,” Emma said.

  “Did you know that he was playing the piano the first time I ever saw him?” her mother asked. “Did you know that, Emma?”

  Emma saw herself opening her father’s closet in the guest room, folding his huge suits and giving them away. But to whom? Such a waste. Don’t think about his clothes. Don’t. But it’s such a waste to just throw them away. For years now, he’d been the heaviest man in town, his movements restricted as though he lived in a cage. The cage of his weight. Of his own making. And the shame of dying because of that.

  “We’re all glad he had his music,” Greta said. She leaned her head against the backrest of the sofa, feeling very tired. Early this morning, before she had known about Robert, she’d made love to Noah, and they’d both slept afterwards for a brief while. When they’d woken up, they’d turned toward one another and when they’d found the bliss once more, she’d wanted to cry at the waste of all those years they had not been together, although she knew instinctively that in their chaste love those early years had been as significant as the years of closeness between them.

  “His music was always there for your father,” Yvonne was telling Emma. “For me too. That’s what I keep thinking about… your father playing the piano. I could always breathe deeper when he played. He lived his best hours inside his music. Did you know that?”

  But all Emma could think of was the piano bench at the Cadeau du Lac. During their last visit to the restaurant, the chair at the table had been too narrow for her father. Still, he had tried to squeeze in, and then, face flushed with humiliation, he’d waddled to the piano bench below the shelf in the lobby where the St. Joseph statue used to stand. Though Emma had wanted to follow her father and help him carry that bench across the dining room to their table, she’d sat without moving, angry at him for being such an embarrassment to her. They had not gone back since.

  In the days between her father’s death and his funeral, they found food hidden away: at the bottom of his hamper eight chocolate bars; beneath his summer hat a block of cheddar cheese; in his car four huge, stone-hard pastries in a mess of nuts and glaze and black-and-white dough. Among his papers was the deed to the Wasserburg, owned by him and Yvonne with right of survivorship.

  Emma tried to talk about the deed with Caleb when they were at Heflins’ buying groceries for the reception that was to follow the burial. “It doesn’t make sense. After going through all that grief with Uncle Tobias and Aunt Greta, he wouldn’t have made the same mistake Opa made.”

  “I always hoped he’d find some way of settling with them.”

  “Maybe he was angry at those two the day he wrote it over to Mother. He never said anything about it.”

  “Who knows what his reasons were.”

  “You think he did it to avoid probate?”

  “Let’s not. Okay?”

  “If he’d known he’d die so young, he would have never put just Mother’s name on the deed.”

  Caleb pushed the grocery cart faster to get away from her.

  “For her to get it all is not fair.” Emma knew it was too soon to talk about any of this, and she tried to stop herself, but she couldn’t. “You know she isn’t capable of looking after the house.”

  “Then she’ll get help.”

  “From whom? And how is she going to pay for it?” When he didn’t answer, she said, “I’m sorry. I know I’m not doing this right.” As they added c
ucumbers and pears to their cart, she asked him about grad school. About his films.

  Still, beneath those questions, he felt her tunneling back to the deed. “A big chunk of cheese,” he told old man Heflin’s widow. “How about a quarter of that wheel over there? And a large salami.”

  “I wish you would let me see some of your films, Caleb.”

  “I’ve only made two so far. Short films … study projects, really.”

  “Do you show them to other students?”

  “Well, yes, but that’s different. It’s seen as something in progress. To learn from. But nothing really finished.”

  “What are they about?”

  “My films?” He stalled, reluctant to summarize for her what he’d spun from memories and imagination, those films that he infused with the intensity of vision his grandfather had experienced from the boat, with details from the stories his grandfather had told him. Like about the fire in the restaurant and the dreams he used to have of America. For Caleb, those two belonged together because the dreams had caused his grandfather to come to America, while the fire had caused him to leave New York and build the Wasserburg. Caleb always felt closer to the people he used for material, a merging of sorts, a loving that was coupled with guilt at having taken from them. Ever since he’d heard about his father’s death, he’d thought that his next film might be about the woman his father had told him about, the woman who fell from love to earth. Though Caleb didn’t know enough about her yet, he had found that, usually, when he envisioned one element, other images that had been evolving separately would suck onto it, become one with it; and what he could already feel coming together with the woman falling were images of a boy born inside a piano with his eyes far open, images of two children playing the people game, of monkeys and songbirds free inside those children’s house. Whenever Caleb took fragments from his own life and made them magical, he felt magical himself. He’d always loved that story of coming into the world eyes open, and he would give that detail to the boy who would live inside the piano even as a man, playing his music from within.