Hotel of the Saints (4 page)

He cashed our paychecks and shopped for our food and cooked for the three of us my own family he said my very own while my daughter did her homework and when we ate he asked her to tell him about school but the happier I got the smaller my daughter looked and I said give her time when she wouldn't talk to him and he slapped her mouth and I said no but I understood that he was like those women in India who jumped off a burning train and were hit by an oncoming train. I read about them in the paper a long time ago but I think of them often and when I told him about them and I said that's just like you getting away from one misfortune only to fall right in the path of the next he said but it's different now because you've come along.

I don't tell him that sometimes I'm grateful he had his hard-luck life that kept him away from the world even though it's unjust because it began when his fiancée cheated on him and he shook her wanting to hear the truth and then she was dead but it means he has come to me new and that I'm his only wife ever because if he hadn't been in jail all these years another woman would have found him long before me and married him.

And even now when I see the rage climb into his eyes it's never for long and most of the time I know how to ease him out of it by taking his hands and bringing them around my breasts and motioning my daughter out of the living room as I pull him into me because then his rage spins into light and fills me and makes me powerful and even when I can't harness his rage and it crushes both of us I always remind myself that he'll only love me so much more the next day. What I've come to recognize is that moment when the power can shift and when he'll either move into me or shatter me with his rage and it's that moment that has become the most exciting thing in my life because if I can turn that rage into light I own him and each time I own him adds to the sum of holding him.

And whenever he talks of leaving because he is afraid of hurting me worse I smile and pull him toward me and sometimes I forget my daughter is in the room because there's no air for anyone but me and him but then his hands are on me and I feel her shrinking away a silent shadow in my raincoat. Some nights she walks in her sleep and I find her on the sidewalk with her hamsters and I hold her and tilt her face to the night and show her how to watch for a shooting star so she can make her secret wish for a miracle of her own.

The summer after
my parents' divorce, my father took me to the yellow hotel near Trieste where we used to stay every July with my mother. The balcony of our suite overlooked the Riviera di Barcola, and from my bedroom, I could see the Adriatic Sea and the cliff with the white
castello
where Maximilian of Haps-burg and Charlotte of Belgium had lived a hundred years ago.

The hotel was a favorite of other German tourists, and whenever my father and I sat in the dining room, we'd hear more German than Italian. Even here, people were gossiping about the Shah of Iran and his third wife, Farah Diba. German newspapers and magazines had been speculating ever since the wedding last December that the Shah would divorce the young architecture student—as he had his previous wives—unless she produced a son. Already Farah Diba was pregnant. But what if she gave birth to a daughter?

My leather dictionary was small enough to carry in my palm, and I would rehearse those vibrant Italian words when my father and I shopped in the open market. I loved the rapid voices rising above the bins of bright fruits and vegetables, the
metal trays filled with fish, the stands with jewelry and combs and lace. Italy was far more exciting than my own country with its somber, guttural sounds that often were like the beginning of a cough. I liked the laugh of the dark-eyed men who sold us tiny golden-crisp fish that crackled when I ate them whole; the plum-shaped tomatoes that still hung on wilting vines; the taut peaches and grapes whose juice would run down my neck when I'd bite into them. Some vendors said I carried the sun in my hair and tried to tease me into bartering a touch of my blond hair in return for so many lire off whatever I wanted to buy. Though my father would shake his head, I'd usually laugh back at the men and let the quick warmth of brown fingers into my long hair.

Every morning, my father and I played a game of tennis behind the hotel and ate the breakfast he fixed for us on our balcony; then I'd run into the blue-green water of the Adriatic Sea, swim out far into the waves, and let them carry me back to shore. The day I got my period—my fourth one ever—I swam as usual, waving to my father, who was setting out for one of his solitary hikes along the beach, carrying his anger and grief in the stiff angle of his arms. He never talked about my mother, and if I mentioned her at all, he'd get very quiet. Sometimes I was afraid he'd just keep walking on that beach, past the city of Trieste, past the border, and into Yugoslavia.

About an hour after my swim, my insides began to cramp with pains that pulsed into my legs, my chest. I tried lying on my bed, sitting up, walking. Nothing helped. One hand against the wall, I made it to our balcony and scanned the long ribbon of sand for my father. But another cramp took hold, and I dropped to my knees. Crying, I curled up by the railing, knees
pulled against the front of my swimsuit, wishing my mother were here. But she was far away, in India on a medical project. That's what my mother had dreamed of doing when, at age nineteen, she became a nun: travel to exotic regions to help the poor who really needed her. I'd grown up knowing that—had it not been for falling in love with my father, the convent accountant, and being surprised by motherhood—my mother would have left Germany long ago to work in those exotic regions with other nuns. Instead, she ended up assisting doctors who took out the tonsils and set the broken bones of ordinary Germans.

Sometimes I thought she had divorced me as much as my father, leaving both of us behind when she met a group of American Mormon missionaries in Berlin, who sent people like my mother to foreign countries where she could heal far more interesting ailments than any she might find in Germany.

But maybe this pain that felt as though my body were turning itself inside out would interest my mother. And maybe the lush setting would contribute to making me a worthwhile patient. Another cramp ran through me, and I moaned, certain I was about to die.
My mother, all dressed in black, stands by my open grave, sobbing as my coffin is lowered into the wormy earth. “I'm sorry, Christa. I'm so sorry. How can I go on living without my only child?” As she tries to throw herself across my coffin, three men—no, four—have to hold her back….

Hot gusts of wind blew in from the sea, carrying specks of sand and the smell of fish. My lips felt dry,
but my mother's cool hand elevates my head as she guides a glass of lemonade to my lips. “Here, drink this, Christa.” Her thin face looks tired from traveling so far to be with me. But at least she is here. Worried that she has not arrived in time to prevent my terrible illness, she
whispers,
“You
need help, dont you?” And I moan, louder, just for her, just to keep her here. Here—

“You need help, don't you?” The voice, I could hear the voice clearly—but it no longer belonged to my mother. And the woman's hair, a lighter shade of blond than my mother's, was not short but braided back into a chignon. She had red-red lips, and she was studying me across the partition from the next balcony. “I'll be right there.”

After her face vanished, I heard the scraping of a chair being dragged onto the balcony. As she climbed across the wall, her back to the sea that lay three floors beneath us, she talked herself through it: “Careful now, Anneliese … don't look down there. You know how you are with heights. Easy, now.” The hem of her white dress flared above her high-heel sandals, and the butterfly clasp of her belt glittered in the sun.

“There, now.” She leapt down on our side of the balcony. “There, now.” Kneeling by my side, she put her arms around me and helped me to sit up.

I could smell her perfume—not flowery like most perfumes, but like the kind of breath you want to hold in your lungs for a long time.

She led me inside and settled me on the sofa, two pillows beneath my feet. “Where does it hurt,
Liebchen?”

I motioned to my belly, my chest, my legs. Another cramp made me draw up my knees. “But it never hurts like this when I have my period.”

She touched the strap of my swimsuit. “You didn't go swimming, did you?” She sounded alarmed.

“For a while.”

“But it's the worst thing you can do, going into salt water
when you have your period. It draws your blood right out of you. Some women try to bring on their bleeding by soaking their feet in salt water. Don't you know that?”

“No.”

“Putting your whole body into salt water …” She clicked her tongue. “Poor girl. Didn't your mother tell you this?”

“She—she went to India. Before I started periods.”

“Is she joining you and your father here?”

“She used to come here … but they're divorced now.”

“Just when you need her most,” she said softly.

Sudden tears crowded the inside of my head. I turned my face aside.

“Men don't know about things like that. At least not how to explain them to a young girl.”

Her name was Frau Hilger, Anneliese Hilger, and she took hold of my life from that moment on. She brought me oval pills from her apartment, made peppermint tea, buttered crisp
Zwieback,
and made me rest on our living-room sofa with two of her German fashion magazines. When my father opened the door, she was frying paper-thin veal cutlets,
Wiener Schnitzel,
in our kitchen.

“Your daughter is doing better,” I heard her whisper before he could say anything.

“What happened? Christa didn't drown or—”

“I have her lying down.” Taking his hand into hers, she steered him toward the sofa where I was lounging, quite comfortable by now, surrounded by cups and plates and magazines.

“My God,” my father said.

I sighed. Draped one hand across my forehead.

“What happened to you,
Kind?”

Frau Hilger winked at me, then smiled at my father as if she
had separate secrets with each of us. “Women's problems.”

He took off his glasses. Busied himself cleaning them with his handkerchief.

“Your daughter should have never gone into salt water. It pulls all the blood out of you at once.”

“Do you need anything?” As he tucked my hair behind my ears, he looked as if he were about to ask me something else, but Frau Hilger laid one slender hand on his arm and drew him toward the kitchen.

“Let me pour you some Chianti,” I heard her say. “Sit down. We'll eat soon.”

“I couldn't impose.”

But she shook her head, firmly. “It's at times like these that a girl needs the friendship of a woman.”

That midday meal, it was just the three of us, but when we entered the dining room in the evening, she waved us over to the table where she was sitting with a man. My father hesitated. But then she waved again, and he patted his brown mustache to make sure it was in place as he started toward her. Frau Hilger's lipstick made her white teeth look even whiter, and she was wearing white again, this time a silk suit with a scarf and that elegant butterfly belt. To me, she seemed like the kind of woman who always wears belts, even with coats.

She invited us to sit and eat with her and her husband, a quiet man with thick eyelids and thick earlobes that gave his face a sleepy look. After greeting us politely, he said little while she recommended the
spezzatino di maiale — a
stew made with pork and olives —and asked my father about his work as an accountant for a boarding school.

Over dessert she told my father, “I admire a man who takes on the responsibility of being a parent.” Looking straight at her
husband, she said, “I've never been fortunate enough to—”

“Don't,” he said.

Her lips trembled.

“Don't, Anneliese.” He tapped his fingers against the starched tablecloth.

“I've never been fortunate enough to birth children.” Her eyes shimmered with tears when she looked at me as if I were the kind of daughter she would have wanted for herself, the daughter she would have never left behind; but soon she was laughing again with her red-red lips.

While Herr Hilger was getting even more silent, my father was talking more than he did when we were alone, and his shoulders were no longer stiff. A few times her ringed hand slid along the back of my father's chair—not touching his neck, though her fingers flexed as if already rehearsing. When we stood up to leave, her husband picked up her purse from the table and handed it to her without grazing her skin.

In the lobby she pressed a few of her oval pills into my hand—“Just in case,
Liebchen”—
and gave my father two tickets. “There's a cruise in Grignano Bay tomorrow afternoon. Herr Hilger and I would be so delighted if you joined us.”

My father stared at the tickets as if weighing their value. Perhaps she already guessed that he was not a man who could let anything fall to waste. I'd seen him finish burned pancakes my mother wanted to throw out, follow her from room to room to switch off the lights she left on—sometimes on purpose to tease him.

Frau Hilger smiled and curved one arm around me. “The statue of San Giusto lies at the bottom of Grignano Bay. But there's no need to decide now. After all—this is a vacation. A time to be spontaneous. If you're not there, Herr Hilger and I'll
amuse ourselves. But just in case, I'll bring a picnic for all of us.”

All of us.
From that day on, all our encounters felt choreographed by Frau Hilger. Mornings, she'd call a greeting to us across the wall between our balconies. She'd insist on cooking the midday meal for us—usually German recipes—in her suite, which was the same size as ours, with two bedrooms and a living room and kitchen. In the evenings, we'd eat
rigatoni
or
cannelloni
with fish or chicken in Trieste or in the dining room of our hotel. When we'd sun ourselves on the beach, it would be next to the Hilgers. While he'd read biographies of composers and I'd swim in the sea, Frau Hilger and my father would stroll along the sand toward Maximilian's white Miramare Castle; but she'd never go into the water above her knees, and even when the wind was strong enough to flip the pages of her husband's book, only a few single hairs would slip from her braided chignon.