Ever After (6 page)

“Do I get to go to the wedding?”

I lean forward and hold Wills tight to me. It's the first time I realize how alone he must feel. It's hard on kids when parents break up. They don't show much at first but afterwards nothing surprises them any more.

That night I call Mom and Dad in Paris. Mom's even more excited than Bert. I can tell Dad is, too. They both have always loved children and, so far, Wills is their only grandchild. I have a hard time getting them off the phone; we don't really have the money to afford long-distance calls to Paris.

Bert is all over me while I'm pregnant, not only to make love, but also to put his face, his ear, even his nose against my stomach as it gets bigger. I feel movement early, just before the fourth month. When Bert feels it, he becomes excited, jumping up and down like one of those Indian dancers you see.

“Bert, you'll wake Frau Zeidelman. Stop acting like an idiot and come back here.”

He lowers himself onto the bed and puts both his hands and his face against me.

“There it is again. It's live. It's pushing right against me. Just feel that.”

“I feel it, Bert. Now relax.”

After that night, he climbs in bed with me every evening after I've read to Wills, and talks to the baby. He not only talks, he sings—crazy songs. I can't imagine how he knows so many. And some have the dirtiest lyrics I've ever heard. He says he learned them as a kid in Oregon. He sings so I begin giggling and then the baby jumps around. It's ridiculous, but I love it.

Then Wills hears us, of course, and wants to join in. He'll have his head on one side of my belly and Bert his head on the other. At first, Bert doesn't sing his dirty songs but then I say it's OK, and Wills laughs so hard he almost falls off the bed. They're just the kind of songs little boys like most.

Now Bert really starts putting pressure on us to get married.

“Look, Kate. My folks come from a small town with only 600 people. They're Catholic, although the only one who's actually religious is my little sister. We don't need to have a church wedding, but they'll feel peculiar if we have our baby without any kind of wedding at all.”

Finally I give in. It's also my parents. They tell us we can have the wedding on the houseboat with a big dance afterward. My parents have a two-story houseboat they put together—a wooden boat on top, with a metal hull underneath. The downstairs is fifty feet long and is almost all one room. The boat looks like an ark and is perfect for parties. This could be our personal Halloween party, to chase away all the ghosts. This was before I knew there are no ghosts, not the way people think, anyway.

So that's what we do. Nobody in Bert's family has ever been to Europe, but the whole passel of them say they're coming. We decide, because we have a five-day holiday for All Saints' and All Souls' Day, to celebrate the marriage on November first. That day will also honor my Aunt Emmaline, Mom's sister. It's her birthday.

I have two aunts, Aunt Emmaline, and Dad's sister, Aunt Jean. They were girlfriends in high school. In fact the two of them brought Dad and Mom together when they were all teenagers. Aunt Jean married a PE teacher in a junior high school and has had five kids, all by Caesarean. Aunt Emmaline was an actress. She got married on her fortieth birthday. It was her first and only marriage. It lasted five years even though she was married to one of the nicest men I've ever met.

I adored Aunt Emmaline when I was a little girl. She lived in gorgeous apartments and wore fancy clothes. She was always on TV in some series or another and was in several films. She was glamorous. She bleached her hair, which normally was sandy-colored like mine, so she looked like a real blonde, and wore heavy make-up. She had a great figure.

Aunt Emmaline was the dream aunt for a teenage girl, a fairy godmother. She'd take me out to eat and buy me clothes. She was as different from my mother as anyone could be. Mom is the same size, but with dark hair and dark eyes. She doesn't dye her hair. She has the same beautiful figure but you'd never know it from the way she dresses. Mom has always been quiet. In fact, I can't remember Mom ever once raising her voice.

But before Aunt Emmaline was fifty, she was a drunk. She'd call us on Christmas Eve almost every year and give what Dad called her “goodbye-goodbye” speech. Dad made it a rule that nobody was to answer the phone on Christmas Eve but him. We could always tell from his face who it was. He'd just listen and nod his head. Normally my dad isn't a great listener. Then he'd say, “Is that all, Em?” He'd pause. “Well, I hope you have a happy life and Merry Christmas. Take care of yourself.” Then he'd hang up. It was always the same. We never knew what she was saying. When I finally asked, he told me she was threatening to kill herself because nobody loved her.

My last dealings with Aunt Emmaline were sad ones.

My younger sister, Camille, and I were living in California. I was in Venice, and Camille in Culver City. Mom's mother, our grandmother, was living in Santa Monica. Emmaline was living in West Hollywood. Grandma was more than eighty at the time.

Grandma called Camille and said she'd been trying to phone Emmaline for three days and nobody answered. She'd taken a cab over to her place but it was all locked up. She wondered what she should do. She was crying.

Camille phoned me. It was evening and Danny was home so I asked him to watch Wills. I drove over to Camille's and from there we headed to Emmaline's. Neither of us was particularly concerned. It wasn't the first time Emmaline had gotten so far out she didn't answer the phone. But we weren't looking forward to it, either.

From previous visits, we knew how to climb through the bathroom window. We parked the car, walked up the hill to her apartment. We knocked several times and rang the bell, but nothing happened. We went around to the back. We promised each other this was the last time we'd ever do this.

I pushed Camille through the little window and she came around to open the front door for me. It was dark, and we turned on some lights. We called out, then saw that the light was on in her bedroom, coming out from a crack under the door.

When we went in, I almost fainted. Even Camille, who's pretty tough, turned her back and screamed.

Aunt Emmaline was stretched out on the floor beside her bed, practically naked. There was shit and piss on the bed, on her and on the floor. We could see right away she was dead. Camille turned back around and stared.

“We've got to phone somebody, the police or somebody.”

But the phone was beside the bed, just in front of where she was spread out. We stood there. Then Camille went around the other side of the bed, reached across and gathered in the phone. She sat down on the floor. I tried to move close to make sure Aunt Emmaline was really dead. She was. She was beginning to stink and it wasn't just the shit and everything. I slunk around and scrunched down on the floor beside Camille. She had the phone on her lap and looked at me.

“I think we ought to call Mom and Dad. They'd know best what to do. What time is it there?”

We figured it had to be about seven in the morning. Camille made two mistakes dialing but finally got it. Her hands were trembling.

She explained the situation as carefully as she could. Dad was on the phone and Mom was on the extra ear-extension they have on French phones. We could hear Mom crying. Dad wanted to know how we were, what we'd done so far.

Camille told him. There was a long quiet pause; we figured he was talking to Mom.

“OK, first look around and see if there's any kind of a note, anything like that.”

We put down the phone and started looking. Camille found a bunch of insurance papers all spread out on the desk. It was good having something to do. I kept trying not to look into the open eyes of Aunt Emmaline. We came back and told Dad what we'd found.

“Put them back into the drawer of the desk, sort of spread around. Don't touch anything else. Just make sure there are no notes.”

We did that.

“Now call the police and an ambulance. Stay there till they come. Then, as soon as possible, go home and, if you have any, take a sleeping pill. I'm sorry you kids had to do this, but it was bound to happen. Just remember, it's what your aunt wanted.”

We did all that and everything went off fine. They put it down that Aunt Emmaline had died of a stroke or something; a friend arranged this with the police so Aunt Emmaline could be buried in holy ground, and so Grandma wouldn't know. It seems this kind of thing is always happening in that part of the world. West Hollywood is sort of the place where failed actresses and actors wind up their careers, one way or another.

I don't know if there's any way I can contact Aunt Emmaline now, I'm not sure I want to, but I chose Aunt Emmaline's day for the wedding: I guess because I'm the closest thing to a child she had. One good thing that came out of the experience was my determination never to drink or fool around with drugs, and I never have.

After the wedding, I return to working at the school, but I begin having trouble with bleeding. I'm sick every morning and feel terrible all day. I'd had an emergency Caesarean with Wills in Los Angeles and the incision was done vertically, both through the stomach wall and the uterus: not exactly what you'd call a “bikini cut.” I want this one naturally, but the doctors in Germany say it's probably impossible. However they also say they'll try.

I've found a
Frauenklinik
nearby, right on the Starnberger See. The baby seems to be growing nicely, but the contractions and bleeding continue. The doctor says I must stay in bed or I could very easily lose the baby.

I tell them at school and show them the doctor's certificate that I should stop teaching. Stan is very sympathetic, and comes several times to see how I am. Ruth, his wife, comes regularly to help keep the place up. I'm surprised how the faculty and parents all help. I knew I had some really good friends, Ellen, Pam, Cindy, Dallas, but I never expected they'd dash into the fray so willingly.

Bert does the laundry, keeps the apartment reasonably neat, takes care of Wills, feeds him, dresses him, all the things that have to be done. He comes home directly from school and gives up his basketball team. I feel spoiled. I keep thinking I'm better, that it's passed, but after half an hour on my feet I'm dizzy and need to slide back into bed again.

I'm glad when that seventh month passes. The doctor says, now, no matter what happens, he can probably save the baby, but he's given up on letting me have a natural birth. He says it's too risky, still I beg him to let me try anyway.

By the middle of the ninth month, my contractions begin and we rush to the
Frauenklinik
, and during seven hours of labor, we try for a natural delivery. But the doctor finally says it's too dangerous and performs a Caesarean. I cry.

Dayiel weighs almost eight pounds. She has to be the most beautiful baby ever. She already has strawberry blonde hair and the biggest, deepest blue eyes anyone could imagine.

Bert comes to visit me in the hospital during his lunch-time, eating sandwiches in the car. He holds the baby, fooling with it, his crazy beret perched on his head, while looking up at me and smiling like a demented fool. I know I'm smiling back in the same way. I have never been so happy.

Then, right in the middle of sedate Starnberg, we have a typically Oregonian event. A group of Bert's old cronies from his high school basketball team, five of them, decide, practically overnight, to visit us from the United States. They want to check out Bert's new baby girl—as well as the famous German beer: a private
Oktoberfest
in mid-April.

Bert's at home when the local policeman leads them to the apartment. They don't speak any German; to be honest, their English isn't so hot. The celebrations had started at the first
Gasthaus
they came across.

The next day, Bert brings them into the hospital. They're all wearing heavy-knit sweaters, lumber jackets, jeans, hard-tipped boots with thick-ribbed woolen stockings folded over at the top. The boots have yellow leather thongs lacing them up. They all have different multicolored stocking caps with pom-poms.

And loud! They seem to think they're out in the woods. The nurses are running and buzzing around, yammering at them, like farmers in the Morvan trying to control a herd of cows as they move it down the road. Bert stops them all outside my room. He doesn't have to explain much. I've figured it out. His Oregon animal buddies have somehow found us. I pull my nightgown shut—I've just finished nursing—and prepare myself for the worst.

Bert's all apologies. He's sheepish, but I know that, underneath, he's pleased they've come all this way.

“OK, Bert. Let them in. We'll just take it as it comes.”

They're quiet for the first few minutes. Bert gives one of them the baby, and he holds her like a cut log, and then she's passed from one to the other, each holding her in a slightly different way, as if she were a water-bucket in a lumberjack fire brigade. Little Dayiel looks each one in the eyes as if this is the most natural thing in the world. Bert's beside me, holding my hand, and as obviously proud as any proud papa could be. Any moment I'm expecting one of them to try a lay-up shot with this strange-shaped basketball. I'm glad when she comes back to Bert and then to me. She smells of cigarettes, sweat, and, I'll swear, Oregon spruce trees.

Finally they're ready to leave. Bert needs to return to school and he gives them the key to our apartment. It's the one to the door at the top of the spiral staircase we use as an entrance.

Just before dinner, Bert comes again on his way home. He and Wills ate at the pizza place but didn't see the mob. He hasn't been home yet. I hate to think of what these woodsmen will have done to our nice little nest—maybe built a fire in the middle of the living-room floor to keep warm.

At about nine o'clock Bert phones, just after I've given Day her bedtime feeding. He still hasn't heard or seen anything of his friends. He'd made arrangements to show them around town and maybe keep them out of trouble, but they didn't show.