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

  Ever since then, they’d come together Wednesdays at three after he closed his office, and they’d gone for hikes or for swims on the far side of Lake Winnipesaukee where no one knew them and where tourists had blanketed the earth between the edge of the water and the hilltops with row after row of boxy cottages. Though Emma could see that Justin savored every minute with her, she couldn’t do the same because she’d get snagged by the sadness that, soon, he would no longer be with her. They wouldn’t return to her apartment till it was dark, and there—after they’d make love, after he’d set her alarm for one A.M. and turn on his side away from her, after she’d adjust her body to fit against his bare back in one smooth motion—she would not sleep at all but lie with her forehead pressed against his spine, willing the sky to conserve its darkness.

  After he’d leave, she’d open her windows and air out his smell of pipe tobacco. It would take her days to recover from his visit, days before she’d feel separate from him once more. She’d immerse herself in the house and all its work, and when Justin would return the following Wednesday, she’d feel a resistance in her body when he’d touch her as if, in reclaiming herself, she’d gone too far.

  Yet, by the time they’d go to bed, that resistance would have worn through once again. Lying next to him after he was asleep, she’d feel a loneliness greater than the loneliness that would feed on her throughout the week. Now and again—though she tried not to—she would think of his wife, four blocks away in the yellow house with the wide porch and the brick chimney and at least two waterlogged ceilings. Perhaps that very instant Laura was wondering where her husband was or planning tomorrow’s meals, while Emma never had the luxury of planning the next day with him. Perhaps Laura was marking their next tennis game on their calendar. The two of them were on the town’s tennis team and played mixed doubles twice a week. “One of the few things we do together,” he had told Emma. Other than that, he didn’t discuss his other life with her, crossing a definite border as he moved between his house and her apartment.

  She longed for him almost constantly. It disturbed her work. Her sleep. And yet felt utterly familiar because she had read about that kind of love in Oma’s letters. And Opa obviously had been a man worth longing for. Certain that his letters, too, had to be somewhere in the house—What did you write to her? How did you respond to those letters of hers?—Emma would periodically search for them in the storage area, the garage, the elevator room, certain that in revealing the flip side of that longing, these letters would make known not only her Opa’s feelings, but also Justin’s. And as she continued to invent her own version of her grandparents’ relationship, their letters—written and unwritten—continued to shape all she believed about love.

  She enjoyed buying gifts for Justin—shirts and sweaters and ties—generous while she was frugal in every other area of her life. Even when he was not with her, he inhabited her rooms with these gifts that he couldn’t take into his other life; and it came to be so that Emma found comfort in having these gifts around, touching them, telling herself that at least she had that one evening a week when he would hold her lightly in his arms while they’d talk in the darkness of her bedroom. His skin was always warmer than hers in the evening.

  “But mine gets warm by morning,” she told him once.

  “Just the opposite for me. Mornings I feel cold.”

  “If we woke up together in the morning—”

  “Don’t make yourself unhappy with that.”

  “If we woke up together in the morning,” she persisted, “I’d keep you warm. Between us we have the perfect way to keep each other warm. Such a waste …”

  “I’ll warm you now.”

  At the grocery store Emma had heard about Laura’s pregnancy one entire month before she had figured out for herself that she, too, was pregnant. During that month she stopped seeing Justin altogether, hurt because she had believed he and his wife no longer made love, angry at herself for being so naive. Not that he had never said so precisely—it was rather what she had taken from his silences.

  But after that month without him, when she called him to tell him she was pregnant and he came to her apartment right away, though it wasn’t a Wednesday, she could no longer dismiss his wife because Laura’s shadow image had been cast around hers, there for the entire town to see. And see they would. And disapprove they would.

  Still, Justin never showed her any doubt about wanting this child. He said he was sure it was a boy from the way Emma carried the new weight—in her hips, her legs, her face—and after three daughters, he looked forward to having a son. Though his enthusiasm cut through some of Emma’s uncertainties, it bothered her that he wasn’t worried about his reputation. Her reputation. And that he didn’t seem to understand how troubled she was by his wife’s pregnancy. Yet, all that fit in with him not planning beyond the following Wednesday. With letting his tools rust outside. With managing problems the way he covered the peeling paint on his house—occasional brush strokes of yellow that didn’t match the background.

  He still hadn’t painted his entire house, though Emma remembered him talking about changing its color when she was still a girl. “I don’t like yellow on a house,” he’d said. Opa used to believe you couldn’t trust people who didn’t care for their property—“They’re lax about other things too”—and it astonished Emma that she could love Justin despite his carelessness.

  She didn’t tell her brother she was pregnant, because Caleb hadn’t liked Justin ever since she’d confided to him on the phone that he was her lover.

  “Dump him.” His reaction had been swift. “One, he’s married. Two, he must be twice your age. And three, you must not settle for this.”

  “I’m not settling for anything. And don’t give me that attitude about marriage. Not after two divorces.”

  “At least I never dated someone who was married.”

  “They were married women by the time you had your second date with them.”

  “Come now … I knew Alison an entire month before I proposed.”

  “Most people date, Caleb; you get married.”

  “Dating … What an extraordinary idea. You’re sure that’s legal?”

  “Try it. You know what? Being with Justin is good for me. Really good. Some people are worth waiting for.”

  “Not while they’re married.”

  “I wish you could be glad for me.”

  “So do I.”

  “The one thing that bothers me—”

  “Only one?”

  “I’m not going to tell you. You’ll just add it to everything else you already hate about him.”

  “Try me.”

  “Well… it bothers me that he leaves at one in the morning to return to his own bed.”

  “And to the wife who lies waiting in that bed for him.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I don’t want you to forget that.”

  “I wish I could forget. When I told him how much that bothers me, we had a fight and he said I was corralling him.”

  “Corralling?”

  “I didn’t know what to say to him. I was too hurt to—”

  “You used to have a mouth on you, Emma.”

  “I still do.”

  “Sure, with me. With Mom. But not with him. You’re turning into a mouse with that man.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Going to that man for love is like going to Radio Shack for bread.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “You already know Radio Shack is not where you buy bread. Still, you keep going back, believing this time it’ll be different.”

  “Your wisdom, Caleb … I’m forever astonished by it.”

  “Corralled … I’m still thinking about that word, Emma. Jesus, why didn’t you tell him you’ll get a cattle prod for him?”

  “I’ll use it if he ever says that again.”

  “Use it anyhow. The cattle prod, I mean.”

  Justin’s fourth child, Oliver, would emerge from
Laura’s womb seven hours before Emma’s son, Stefan, would fling his arms open to daylight. The children would sit in the same first-grade class, both with the dark eyebrows and with the deep pinprick dimple in the chin that would make others notice their resemblance, though no one would openly comment on it.

  From the day of Stefan’s birth, Emma watched and fussed over him with an anxious and distracted love, eager to do the best she could. Whenever she was surprised by pure flashes of joy, she’d try to hold on to them, afraid something terrible might happen to Stefan if she didn’t. Her worried questions she brought to Justin who owned all the advice, and when he dispersed it with his usual thoughtfulness and kindness, she felt safe having a doctor as her child’s father, a doctor who could certainly keep Stefan alive even though he hadn’t acknowledged him yet openly as his son.

  She took the baby along when she worked on the house, propping him up in his carriage or a small playpen, talking to him while she scraped or painted or cleaned. When she absolutely had to, she’d ask her mother or one of the tenants to watch him for a few hours. Some evenings she carried Stefan up to the roof and tried to find contentment in this high place where she had watched her Oma and Mrs. Bloom recline in their chairs with tall drinks as if they were at a resort. But the feelings she’d expect wouldn’t always come. Instead she’d notice the cracks in the rooftop, the dirt, the air that was too hot or too cold. And always, she’d remain just who she was: a woman harried by too much to do; a woman already counting everything she was failing to complete; a woman with a child but without a man of her own.

  After Stefan’s birth, she had waited for her mother and the tenants to ask questions about her child’s father, but they never had as though it were totally normal that Emma had given birth to a fatherless child who resembled the town’s doctor. It was not that easy with the rest of the town. There were glances, whispers that were hard to bear because they made her afraid that her son would grow up to feel shame. Still—she knew she would not have undone one single hour of having him in her life.

  Actually, he was a lot like her Opa— not just in name but in willfulness, though it was a quieter willfulness. He too was drawn to the stars and their stories. They would have liked each other, the old Stefan and the young Stefan. She felt a link between those two whenever she told her son about his great-grandfather who had built the Wasserburg.

  “He was a handsome man. Bright like you. He died before you were born. But I’m sure he would have been very proud of you.”

  From family photos that hung in the hallway, the boy knew what his great-grandfather looked like, and he grew up admiring him, so aware of him that it was as though the old man lived with him and his mother, the three of them moving within a triangle that only changed shape once a week when the other man arrived with surprises: wooden tongue depressors; rubber gloves he’d blow up into cow-udder balloons. They’d have a treasure hunt: the man would hide his surprises in the apartment, and Stefan would search behind drapes and wastebaskets, beneath chairs and beds. “Cold,” the man would say, “Warmer … Hot…” until Stefan found everything. Then the man would swoop him high into the air, laughing, while the skin around his eyes scrunched up all funny.

  From the time he was very young, Stefan understood that he was to call this man Father inside the apartment and Doctor everywhere else; and since he had nothing to compare this arrangement to, he considered it normal, just as he considered it normal that it was only on Wednesdays that he was part of what his mother called “our family.” Wednesdays his father looked at the pictures Stefan had drawn in nursery school. Wednesdays his father reminded Stefan to keep his elbows off the table while he ate.

  “Our son,” his mother would say on Wednesdays and smile as she tasted the words. Our son.

  “Listen to the new words our son learned in school…”

  “Do you think it is time for our son to go to bed?”

  Stefan learned that his mother was sad after the man left. Learned that he could take care of her sadness by climbing on her knees and linking his arms around her neck; by holding doors open for her when they went to stores; by helping her rub lemon oil on the furniture until it gleamed. Learned that even if her face felt all wet against his, he could make her smile. Still—he loved her best when he didn’t have to worry about keeping the sadness from her. Loved her best when he had her all to himself and could fall asleep to the sound of her voice telling him stories about the stars and the constellations and about how they got their names. His favorite was Orion, the warrior. He had a sword and a shield and more bright stars than the other constellations.

  Stefan was five, had been five for half a year of waiting for an evening warm enough to watch the stars from the dock, but this winter the snow was lasting into May. Finally, it began to melt on the streets and on the slopes of the mountains, though their crests were still white.

  The last evening of May, though, the air was mild and the sky clear. Lying beneath the stars on the dock with his mother was much better than watching them through a telescope from his living room window as he had all through the winter and spring.

  “Can you see Pegasus?” His mother pointed up toward the sky. “The winged horse that carried Perseus and Andromeda to safety.”

  “Tell me again.”

  “You know the story better than I.” As Emma began, she could hear Opa’s voice beneath her own, telling her the same story in German here on this dock during a night much like this night. “Andromeda war eine schöne Prinzessin…”—“Andromeda was a beautiful princess … and the sea nymphs were jealous of her. They complained to Neptune, who tried to destroy the kingdom of Andromeda’s father, King Cepheus, by sending—”

  “He sent a big whale,” her son interrupted. “A monster whale.”

  “Right.”

  “And the whale was so big that nobody could kill him. He swallowed everybody in the kingdom.”

  “Well, not everybody, but many people. Some of the people who got away from the whale chained Andromeda to a rock by the ocean.” Her voice was soft and came to Stefan from as far away as the Milky Way that floated above him like a river of stars.

  Below them, the lake slapped against the wooden pilings, sending shivers of air through the gaps between the boards, making Stefan think of the waves around Andromeda’s feet, of the chains cutting into her white gown. “Andromeda was very, very afraid.”

  “That’s right. You see, her father believed that sacrificing her to the whale would stop him from killing others. But just as the whale swam up to her, opening his monstrous mouth to swallow her—” Emma paused, waiting for him to tell his favorite part of the story.

  “Perseus saved her.” Stefan clapped his hands. “He killed the whale. The next day he married Andromeda.”

  Emma laughed. “I’m not sure it was the next day.”

  “And they flew away on Pegasus.”

  “Can you see Cassiopeia, her mother?”

  “Up there.” He pointed. “In between Andromeda and Cepheus.”

  “Very good.” As his arm came down, Emma followed its descent until it grazed the lake and the rowboat where Opa had lain with his first wife on pillows, night surrounding them, looking toward the land where his Wasserburg stood high above the bank. But it wasn’t built then. Not yet. Still, Opa had seen it.

  “Mom?”

  One night. Linking all nights into that one night. Across the water, the wind picked up, carrying the scents of fish and new leaves in its moist wake.

  The boy shivered, and for a moment there he was Andromeda, staring at the gray mass of water as it swelled up and fell from the sleek bulk of the whale. “Mom—”

  “I’m here.” In the half dark, her strong, pale chin moved toward him. Her blonde eyebrows. Her hand on his hair.

  Raising himself on his elbows, he asked, “Was Cepheus going to let the whale kill his daughter?”

  “It’s a myth.” She kissed his forehead.

  “I don’t think he liked her.”


  “He believed he had to sacrifice her.”

  “I would never feed you to a whale.”

  1980–1986

  The moving men were bigger than Uncle Danny. They wore gray overalls and smelled of sweat when they came into Stefan’s room and took the boxes with his toys and books, his clothes and the star charts his mother had drawn with him. But those charts weren’t as good as the charts of his German great-great-grandmother that were drawn on linen like the blueprints of the Wasserburg. When Stefan had asked if he could hang them up in his room, his mother had said that he was too young.

  “You might damage them without realizing,” she’d said.

  While she checked on the moving men to make sure that they, too, didn’t damage anything, Stefan hid in his closet. He always did during moves. But today it was too hot in there, and he followed the men into the elevator and pushed the button to the second floor where he and his mother would live until she would renovate that apartment too and rent it out.

  So far, Stefan had lived on every floor of the Wasserburg. He wished he lived in a small house where he’d always have the same bedroom and the same kitchen and the same living room. His first move, so his mother had told him, had happened soon after his birth when she’d shown five vacant apartments to Miss Fitzpatrick who worked at one of the resorts. Miss Fitzpatrick hadn’t liked any, except the one where Stefan and his mother already lived. “It’s yours if you want it,” his mother had said and moved everything to the third floor. From then on they’d lived in apartments that were difficult to rent, and once his mother had fixed those up, they’d moved again.