Under the Same Blue Sky (21 page)

In the kitchen was another letter from my mother. “He’s so worried that new customers will hear his accent and go away that he hired an American clerk named Frank.” My father spooled between home and store as if under fire. He gave extra weights in nails and screws and tested every item, as if he might be arrested for a bent nail. “Dr. Edson says it’s like he’s shell-shocked, even if he’s thousands of miles from the front. What can we do?” Looking up, I saw Tom and Anna watching me with anxious concern. I translated the scrawled page.

“Invite them here,” Tom suggested.

“I already did. My father won’t leave the store.”

“Ask again, or have the baron invite him. This Frank can manage for a week. And since the baron’s in his library and you don’t have anything to do right now, you can come apple picking with me.”

“Go on, Hazel,” said Anna. “I need the apples and you’re working too hard.”

I went. It was a warm afternoon with the slightest hint of cool in puffs of breeze. We filled baskets with windfalls for cider, applesauce, and apple butter. I climbed a ladder into the dappled shade and passed down perfect red globes for eating. Sunlight splashed on Tom’s upturned face. He caught fruit like baseballs, jumping and diving. Lilli watched, first perplexed, then bored. She stretched out on the grass to sleep.

“I could still carry you on my shoulders,” Tom said.

“You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

“But—”

“Nobody can see us. Kurt’s in the rose garden.” I eased from the ladder onto Tom’s shoulders. Memories came rolling back. Yes, I was like this once, high and safe, looking down on flower faces. He carried me to an apple tree with a low-hanging branch. When I grabbed it, he slipped out from under me, held my waist, and gently let me down.

We stood close together in the charged silence, warm wind ruffling our hair until, with slow-coming thought, I managed: “Anna’s waiting for the apples.”

“I suppose she is.” We carried the bushel between us. Lilli trotted ahead, looking back for orders. A hawk circled overhead. A question flew out of me: “If America joins the war, you wouldn’t go, Tom, would you? Because—the baron needs you. You’re so necessary here.”

He threw a stick for Lilli and she bounded after it. “If there’s a draft, I’d have to go, but let’s not worry about that now.”
Let’s. Let us. Us.
We didn’t speak all way back to the kitchen. Let me, let
us
stay in this island of peace, cloistered, disappointing nobody, causing no damage or pain, just . . . picking apples.

Anna took the bushel and we snapped apart; Tom had an errand in the next town and I went to my room. The baron still hadn’t left the library or given new orders for work. My mind flicked restlessly to the orchard with Tom, to Pittsburgh with my shell-shocked father, and to the peaceful early days in Galway. Then I saw the Dogwood station and a train taking Tom away. In the autumn sun, maples, birches, and aspen sparkled in reds and yellows. A bright leaf fluttering down took me to Ben falling. Friedrich falling, burning. Tom falling, burning.
Other faces, draw other faces.
I drew Alice, Susanna, Charlie, and Emma. I drew my father with his pipe and my mother with her mending, both of them telling me stories of the Old Country long ago.

Anna and I ate alone, for Tom hadn’t returned. I read after dinner, or tried to. After midnight, Lilli scratched at my door. When I opened it, she walked a few steps, turned, and waited. Someone must have said: “Find Hazel.” Surely it was Tom. I dressed, brushed my hair and hurried after her, but she led me instead to the tower office door, framed by a leak of light. I knocked.

“Come in.” The baron was at his desk, head in hand.

“Do you have a headache, sir?”

“No. This war defeats me, Hazel.”
Hazel
. He’d never used my first name before. “I appreciate the late hour, but—”

“I can work now, Baron, if you need me.” I went to my desk, expecting a task. But there were no instructions set out for me. He gave no orders, just faced the dark window.

“Germany our mother, America our bride,” he said finally. “When our bride goes to war against our mother, as she surely will, can we stand by? And if not stand by, do what? I was wrong when I said war can’t be everywhere or affect every man. Sometimes I think I should go back to Germany and enlist. Perhaps I can—”

“No,” I said too sharply. “Aren’t there enough bodies? You have to
stay here. Think how much art has survived through so many wars, protected by the work we’re doing now, by people like you.” He drummed his armrests. “And you’re helping the fund with your Ming vases, and the Gauguin.” The chiseled face turned to me. “I saw papers on your desk, sir. Under the
Staats-Zeitung.
I shouldn’t have looked.”

“Which goes without saying. However, you did look. And it’s true. My mother is suffering.” His country or his blood mother? The set face deflected questions. “I was trained to be a soldier, but you’re right. What good is one more dead body?”

“So then,” I ventured carefully, “since I
did
look, did you want to sell the pieces on your list?”

“Yes, as quickly as possible. Shall we begin?”

We did. I prepared an offering letter for the Gauguin that was acceptable, even “good” by the second draft. As I typed, the baron disappeared, returning with wine, cheese, ham, pickles, bread, butter, and a linen cloth he spread on the marble table.

“I seem to be hungry. Perhaps you’ll join me?” What would my mother say to dining alone and so late with a gentleman? But how solemnly we toasted Germany the mother and America the bride in the silent room, sharing the secret intimacy of those who worked as others slept.

“I haven’t had a headache since—Friedrich died,” the baron said. “Strange, isn’t it?”

“Yes, sir. It’s as if he took your pain with him.”

“Perhaps. But there are other sorts of pain, are there not?”

“Yes.” I related my father’s “shell shock” and our anxious hope that a visit to Dogwood might relieve or at least distract him.

“Tom came to see me regarding this. I suspect he’s concerned that you might leave us, which would be a problem to me as well. He suggested that I invite your parents here myself. If you like, I’ll do so.”

“Thank you, sir. I would be grateful.”

“Tell me about growing up over a hardware store.”

He leaned back, crossing his legs like any civilian, resting a wine goblet on his knee. Memories came and came, astonishing in their detail. I described the smells of our flat, the cinnamon and soap, warm bread, beer, floor wax, and fresh flowers managed by many small economies. I recounted Sunday dinners with Uncle Willy and Tante Elise, how the store was closed for my school recitals, how my father sat on my bed at night and told tales, changing his voice for bears, witches, princesses, and woodsmen. I described the kitchen table where I did my homework, where my mother prepared meals and sweets, my father did his store accounts and made tins, and where we talked about our days.

The baron listened as if to a fairy tale. “My brother and I ate with the governess. She brought me down for interrogations.”

“Interrogations?”

“Before we were old enough for the military academy, we were tutored in fencing, gymnastics, Latin, and German history. My father tested our progress. He did not sit on beds and tell stories.”

“He was proud of your progress?” I ventured.

“Moderately, at first. I was a better scholar than Erich. However, a family needs heirs, and when I would not provide one by marrying properly, even for show as an uncle had done, it was suggested that I establish myself elsewhere.”

So Anna’s story was true. “Your brother—”

“Erich will, weary of his dalliances, marry, and inherit the castle, even if he despises ‘that old pile.’ However, if he survives the war, which is likely as an attaché behind the lines, he may lose everything to gambling debts. Absurd, isn’t it, that to preserve his patrimony, his chief pride, my father chose the son least likely or inclined to do this?”

“Yes, it is—absurd.” I considered which question might be least aggravating to the baron’s melancholy state. “You correspond with your family?”

He shook his head as if at a preposterous notion. “Rarely. An agent keeps me informed. You are more fortunate in your acquired parents.”

“Yes, sir. I am.” Had I ever repaid that good fortune?

“And your mother, if she comes, could be induced to make her meatballs?”

“Yes, I’m sure so.”

“Good. And now, refreshed, shall we return to work?”

Hours later, when violet streaks announced the dawn, we slipped our documents into an envelope that would be taken by messenger to New York. “We’ll resume tomorrow,” the baron said. “I’ve imposed on you enough for today. I will telegraph an invitation to your parents.” Buoyant with sleeplessness and the intimacy of that night, I went down to the kitchen, where Anna and Tom curiously compared the dark circles under my eyes with the airy lightness of my step. I even let Anna bring me oatmeal, which she always offered and I always refused.

“Finally. People who don’t eat oatmeal dry up before their time.”

“If you’ll eat oatmeal, will you go flying with me today?” Tom asked. Barely thinking, I agreed.

Anna turned on him. “So you’ve been flying? Since when?”

“Three months.”

“And keeping it secret all this time. Now you’re taking Hazel up. Suppose—”

He put an arm around the broad shoulders. “I promise I’ll bring her back. And I’ll take you up someday if you want.”

“No, not me, not ever.” She laid a hand on his cheek. “Be careful. I didn’t fuss after you all these years to have you fall out of the sky like Friedrich.”

“I know, Anna.”

She turned away. “Well, go then, and come back safe.”

“We will. Hazel, let’s leave before you change your mind.”

Anna’s wide, anxious face filled the window as we left. “She’s like a mother to you,” I commented.

“Of course.”

“Did you—”

“Let’s go. The airfield is twenty miles away.” Airfield. It seemed a great joke. A field of air. Tom drove quickly over the country roads, earnestly explaining how air could hold us up. I was strangely calm until we parked, rounded a corner hedge, and I saw three airplanes, fragile as dragonflies, their wings bobbing in the breeze.

I pulled back. “No, Tom, I can’t.”

“I know. It looks impossible. That’s the miracle I was telling you about.” A miracle. I wanted one in my life now. A magical, lifting touch.

A gangly mechanic appeared from a shed and raised his cap to me, beaming at Tom. “So I guess I owe you five dollars. How’d you get her to say yes?”

“Timing, Steve. She’d been up all night.”

I stood aside as they checked instruments and maps, speaking of gauges and speeds. Birds swirled overhead. After all my life on land, I’d be joining them. The idea was stunning enough; the reality left me breathless as I was helped into the cockpit, given a helmet and goggles, and heard the last shouted bits of advice from Steve as we bumped across the grassy field: “Throttle . . . north, northwest . . . the curves . . . thirty minutes, don’t forget.”

Tom’s face, as fixed and calm as when he trained Lilli, took the full morning sun. “About to lift off!” he shouted. “And now . . . up!” I closed my eyes.

Before that minute, “up” was jumping; “up” was a park swing or
the inclined railroad in Pittsburgh. This was the
up
of angels. The day’s warmth turned chill against my face; my clothes flapped; my heart pounded. “Look where we came from!” Tom cried. I looked down and gasped. The airfield was a green cloth. Small as a puppy, Steve waved at us. Houses were toys; trees were lumps of russet and gold. A Constable landscape spread below us. Sun glazed Tom’s goggles. His words flew at me: “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

“Yes!”

He pointed: “Newark . . . Pittsburgh that way . . . and over there, behind us is Philadelphia. Let’s go see the castle.” We put the sun behind us and yes, in a minute, there was Dogwood and the castle’s slate roof and towers, lawns and gardens. “Orchard!” Tom shouted in my ear, pointing to the grid of apple trees where we’d stood so close together. The war was nowhere. I opened my mouth, breathing in sky. Air field. Air plane. Air woman. Air man. The pure joy of air.

“Will you bring my father flying?” I called over the wind.

“Yes, of course.” Tom pointed to a hawk considering us. Were we his larger cousin, a great eagle? We swerved over a ribbon of water, a farm, and another village. Far away, on the airfield’s green cloth, I spied Steve waving a red cloth.

“We’ve been up thirty minutes. Time to land.” Thirty minutes! Unbounded by earth, I thought we’d escaped time as well.

We bounced to the ground. Steve helped me from the plane. “Well, Hazel, do you like flying?”

“You owe Tom five dollars.”

Steve paid. They spoke again of wind, gauges, and a slight wing imbalance as I looked up to the empty sky. We’d been
there,
looking down
here
. As we ran to the car, wind lifted my undone hair as if we were flying again. Tom turned to me: “You understand now?”

“Yes, oh yes.”

We went to the airfield twice more, each flight more spectacular as autumn spread her tapestries below us. Then no more.

A fire broke out on the airfield, destroying every plane. Newspapers blamed Stefan Bauer, a German-American mechanic, alias “Steve Banks,” claiming that he’d acted on the Kaiser’s orders. “It wasn’t Steve,” Tom swore. “He’s as American as I am.” Steve even had an alibi. On the night of the fire, he’d been seen in a tavern far from the airfield. Still he was charged with arson and espionage and taken “elsewhere” for trial. At the courthouse, Tom was told that no more information was available. “And considering who you work for, Mr. Jamison,” a clerk warned, “it’s best not to be overinterested in Stefan Bauer.”

That night, looking out into the starry, moonless sky, I recalled my first flight, the magical “up” of pure freedom, away from earth’s troubles and fears, the glint on Tom’s goggles, and flying with the hawk. More and more, through the next months, as America drew closer to war, that hawk became an enemy plane bearing down on us, shooting fire. What could protect a craft of wood and metal sheeting? Suppose an attack came from behind, invisible against the sun, or burst from covering clouds? A stunning jolt, the craft shudders and falls into the terrible earth, spinning and burning.