Hotel of the Saints (10 page)

But the following morning, I found him crouching by the side of the pool as though he'd dropped something into the water. He pointed to the surface, where two chipmunks floated, no more than a foot apart from each other.

“Are they dead?”

“I think so.” His face was pale. “You better get them out.”

Just seeing those small, stiff shapes gave me goose bumps. “Dad-”

“Never make a coward's choice.” He looked at me steadily. Then turned and went into the house.

My hands felt damp as I got a trash bag and the aluminum pole with the net. Slowly I dipped the net into the water, pulling it forward until it caught the body closest to me. Maybe I could get both at once. But when I lowered the pole, the chipmunk fell from the net. It sank slowly, turning over, then rose back to the surface. I squinted against the bright sun. The hot smell of chlorine clotted my nostrils. Pressing my teeth together, I bent for the pole, careful to try for only one of the chipmunks this time. After I'd caught it, I swung the net to the edge of the pool, but when I opened the trash bag to drop the small body into it, one of its stiffened claws was tangled in the net.

I wanted to run to my room. Stay there. But my father would only send me back out. And suddenly it didn't feel right anymore, obeying him, making the hardest choice. It was twisted around. Not the way it was supposed to be. Eyes blurry with tears, I searched for a twig to pry the chipmunk from the mesh. At first I was afraid of breaking its front leg, of hearing it snap, but after a while that no longer mattered. All I wanted was to get it over with. I threw the twig aside and, with my fingers, pried the rigid claw from the net. With a soft thud, the animal fell into the trash bag. Its eyes were black like crinkled leather. Getting the second chipmunk was easier. I left the pole by the water and carried the bag to the garage, where I dropped it into the trash can and pressed down on the lid. Only when I was
soaping my hands and arms up to my elbows did I realize that my cheeks were aching and that I was still clenching my teeth.

I never told Eleanor about that day by the pool. Because I knew it would frighten her. Not just what my father did. But that I would obey like that. And the damage I was doing to myself.

Although we've been married four years now, I still follow the visiting pattern my parents drew up between them when they divorced—alternate Christmases. Thanksgivings belong to Eleanor's family. The first Christmas we were married we spent with my mother, who has a house just ten minutes from ours. She applied for a teaching job in Lincoln City soon after I moved there. Year two of our marriage, it was my father's turn to have us for Christmas. Like some gift he was entitled to. I didn't want to travel across Oregon to be miserable. Worried how he would be with Eleanor.

It was worse than anything I'd imagined. She admired the table he'd set with crystal goblets and the gold-rimmed plates he'd inherited from Austria. Told him, “You didn't have to do all that work for us.”

My father slammed the oven door. “As you wish,” he said, and removed the good china and silver and linen. Then he threw plastic utensils on the bare table and tossed paper plates as if they were Frisbees, making each one land between a plastic fork and knife.

“Quite a performance,” Eleanor said calmly.

He squinted at her. “Let's sit down and eat.”

“Good.” To me, she whispered, “Can he control his temper?”

“I think he's showing off.” I rolled my eyes, tried to pretend the whole thing wasn't as awful as it was.

The following day, he packed
Lebkuchen
and
Stollen
on two of the serving platters he'd yanked off the table just the night before, wrapped them into bath towels for us to take home, and when Eleanor objected, he persisted, “You can bring them back the next time you visit me.”

In the hospital parking lot, a car door slams and a motor starts. Two motors. Probably visitors leaving.

I stand up. Against the slick linoleum floor, my shoes look scruffy. “I have a long drive back home,” I explain. “I should — ”

“You — ” My father motions me close.

“Yes?”

“You — ” His voice is hoarse, his breath shallow. He says something else I can't understand.

“Are you talking about Tiffany?” I shouldn't have mentioned her. Now he'll keep fretting about her and that poor Mrs. Lodge who is holding on to the forgotten child in school. Just as he frets about the librarian who bequeathed him her heart, and about her parents to whom she is lost. While he is carrying their daughter inside his chest as though it were a womb—the closest he has come to giving birth. His ultimate goal, I suspect. Though I've heard people say the human race would become extinct if men had to give birth, I believe my father would have gladly endured the pain of bringing forth children from his body. A dozen children. As many children as his body could yield.

“You …” My father's mouth is trying to shape itself around words.

I sit down again. Bend closer. “I'm sure Mrs. Lodge reached Tiffany's father that same day. He is probably a very good parent.”

One of my father's pale hands makes a faint arch, as if to dismiss that possibility.

“This Mrs. Lodge,” I say, “you know, if she—”

“You were conceived—”

“Let me fix your pillow,” I offer quickly. I don't want to hear about my conception.

“… during the first… moonwalk.”

Absurdly, I see my father and mother
coupling on the dimpled surface of a chalky moon, levitating parallel to each other in padded space suits, exposing only what is needed to conceive me.

“… that summer of 1969,” my father says. The bead of sweat between his eyebrows hasn't moved. Just sits there like a hardened drop of Crazy Glue. Some of his words slur as he tells me how my grandparents were visiting from Austria for an entire month that summer, staying with him and my mother in the green Victorian where they rented a small apartment on the second floor. To dodge my grandparents, my father would disappear with my mother into the bedroom and resume his attempts at having a new baby, to start his family once again, a large family, supplant my mother's sorrow for the girl she had miscarried. But for over a decade nothing had happened, though my father had begun to chart my mother's fertile days on graph paper. A
decade of fertile days.
And what he tells me about the moonwalk is that the television was on in the living room, right outside the bedroom, and that he and my mother could hear the voices of my grandparents marveling in German at the American astronauts.

As my father pauses, I'm left with the picture of my grandparents—long since dead —in the apartment where I grew up.
They have pulled the tufted sofa with its carved armrests up to the
television. Behind them, a striped curtain hides a Sears refrigerator-sink-stove combination and cupboards that will still smell of nutmeg and scouring powder when I am a boy. Through the window I can see the peaks of the Wallowas. Across the hall lives a man from India with pitted skin who works at the local shoe store and wears black ties even on his day off. Though pets are banned from the building, he has four cats; I'll never see them, but at night I'll often hear them and learn to distinguish their cries.

At the moment, however, when my grandparents' trim bodies lean forward, I have not yet been conceived. Their mountain-brown faces are set in concentration as they witness the astronauts take their initial steps across new territory.

“I think …” My father fidgets on his pillow. “I think they felt lucky to be in America.”

“Lucky?”

“They said it felt… nearer to the moon than Austria.”

Lucky to have arrived here, to be with the son who left them behind, the son whose German words are tinged by his American life.
I don't want to imagine my parents in the bedroom,
limbs entwined, their wishes giving shape to what is to become me.
What I want is to find out what is to become of my father now. He seems quieter, kinder than he used to be. But what if it's not the donor's heart that has done this? What if my father has been like this all along, and I have failed to recognize him?

He's tugging at the neckline of his hospital gown, and I'm stunned by the suddenness of my grief, know that this past year—ever since he had his first heart attack—I have been grieving for him. I just didn't know the language.

“I want to finish those books for her. I don't know how she keeps track of all the different plots…. Bathrobes.”

Somehow I figured I'd always be running from him. It's what I'm used to. What I'm good at.

“They sat in front of the television in those bathrobes…. Without knowing a word of English … went to the store and—” He frowns as if he's forgotten what he wants to say.

“Bathrobes,” I prod him. “Television. Stores.”

He nods. His voice becomes more coherent as he glides into memories that are nearly three decades old. How my grandparents read travel guides in German. How they navigated without the precise words to describe what they needed, relying instead on intuitive sounds and gestures. How pleased they were to be understood by the saleswoman who didn't speak one word of German and yet sold them those bathrobes. “The next day they went back to the store. She was… their first American friend, they said, and they brought her—”

Another gurney passes in the hallway. Then a man pushing a heavy floor-wax machine.

“—marzipan, John. Marzipan from Austria. Your favorite.”

“My favorite. Yes. What color were they … those bathrobes?”

“Plaid.”

“Plaid is not a color,” I tease him.

“Plaid,” he insists. Then adds, “Green and red.”

I adjust the picture of my grandparents:
In their green-and-red-plaid bathrobes, they're leaning forward now, closer yet to the screen, as if, indeed, that will bring them nearer to the moon, and while they witness the astronauts first uncertain steps, my father is keeping to what he's mapped out, traveling toward who I am to become, not embryo yet, not fused yet to my mother, only to my father's will as I drift toward him in the unknown, toward abrupt and brutal baptism in alien habitat.

My father is silent in the alert way of great thinkers as he lies connected like a moonwalker to his life-support system, and as I sit by his bed, reaching through my discomfort and fear to assure myself he is here,
still here,
I lay one palm against his cheek, linking him to me. I feel him listening inward, trying to understand this female heart of his, while my grandparents
sit in front of the television, listening to foreign words as a white-padded figure bounces across the surface of an unfamiliar landscape, while
—
in their own language, their own symbols
—
they too cross the chasm between what they hear and what they see.

Manfred and Kurt Rustemeier
are twins who live in our parish. In a town as small as ours, twins are a rarity. We've only had one other set, the Friedman sisters, maiden ladies who both played the accordion and had to be relocated to Poland in 1941. That happened nine years after the Rustemeier twins were born. We celebrated the boys' christening at the Catholic church, witnessed their first
Kommunion,
watched them play soccer in the empty lots among the rubble of war, and we were not surprised when they married local girls on the same Sunday in May of 1952. They were twenty that spring, the Rustemeier brothers, too young to have fought in the war, too old to have grown up without the memories that none of us like to talk about and that we do our best to shield our children from. What we teach them is to value the good in their lives. To look ahead, not back. To be industrious. Pious. And above all, to obey. It is our way of going on. Regardless of what the world has to say about the
Vaterland.

The first children of the twins were born within one month of each other, first Kurt's daughter, Helga, fair-skinned and
wiry, then Manfred's son, Johannes, marked with the moonface of the sad and innocent. While Helga's movements were lively, the unfortunate boy turned his head sluggishly and regarded his surroundings through almond-shaped eyes. His damp lips would work themselves around sounds we couldn't understand. He was late to crawl, late to stand up and walk. At times we felt ashamed of the secret relief that
any
parent among us—whose child was not afflicted like Johannes—must have felt. It's because we've known the sorrow of having children like that taken from us. By the government or by God. How can anyone keep such a child safe?

Because we've seen how worries of that nature will tear at parents, we watched Manfred and his wife; but both Rustemeier families took care of the flawed boy and kept him alive. It didn't seem to matter to them to which parents he belonged, because the Rustemeiers often were together though they lived two blocks apart. What the boy liked to do was pull himself up by gripping the hem of a curtain, not hard enough to tear it down, but enough to steady himself, as if he understood the difference. He'd do this not only at home but also in our houses when the Rustemeiers visited, and it saddened us to watch his father and his Uncle Kurt with him, the immense patience — tenderness, even—of these tall men as they'd take the boy by the arms, trying to teach him to walk as if they believed they could make him whole, listening to his babbling as though real words were hidden somewhere in that singsong.

Like other young men who had not been seized from us by the war, the Rustemeier twins worked in construction, rebuilding the ruins of our town, while their wives sewed curtains, embroidered tablecloths, traded recipes and dress patterns, and
kept their children clean. It was easier by then to feed our children. Only a few years earlier, we all had known what it was like to go to sleep aching with hunger, and then to wake to the sirens and bombs. Without coal, there were nights so cold we were sure we would freeze to death, as others had in our neighborhoods. We waited in long lines for scant rations, survived on thin soups boiled from
Kartoffelschalen—
potato peels—and
Rüben—
turnips. It was a time of upheaval, and we finally deserved order.