Read Under the Same Blue Sky Online
Authors: Pamela Schoenewaldt
“But—”
“Hazel, you asked if I want ‘that’ in my life? I want you.” The wind was bitter now. The kitchen door opened. Anna apparently gave Lilli an order, for she trotted down the gravel path, sniffing. “She’ll find us. Watch.” And yes, she was heading to the gazebo. “Our chaperone. All right, girl, we’re going inside.” Lilli led us back to the kitchen, to mugs of hot cocoa and our people. But I was already warmed, glowing like fire inside.
T
HE NEXT WEEK
brought early snow and blasts of war news. My father began walking into Dogwood to get the morning paper and relating the news at breakfast. “Let’s not talk about that,” my mother would say.
But my father couldn’t keep silent. “One million casualties at Somme,” he announced when the Allies claimed victory. “More than any battle in human history. One million.
One million.
”
“Please,” my mother said softly.
“What? We can’t talk about
one million
casualties?”
“Perhaps it’s the last big battle,” Anna suggested.
“You really think so?”
The next Monday, taking letters to the post office, I passed my father on a bench in the churchyard, rocking slightly. I hurried to sit by him and take his hand. He shook his head. “Remember the Bible verse yesterday: ‘How long must I take counsel in my soul and have sorrow in my heart all the day?’”
“I remember.”
“You and your mother wanted me to come here, so I did. But it doesn’t help. I have sorrow in my heart all the day because there’s too much pain over there. Hazel, one million dead. We thought Tannenberg was terrible, but think of the bodies at the Somme: a thousand wide, a thousand deep. Look.” He pointed down the icy street. “Imagine them here.” Yes, with his eyes, I saw a blanket of death. “And how many of those bullets were made in Pittsburgh?”
I put my arm around his back, shaking him slightly. “Let’s go home. The baron needs more packing cases.”
He stood heavily. “How many of our customers back home worked in those plants? How many—”
Think of something.
“Would you like to stay here until the war ends?”
He shrugged. “If Katarina does.”
I asked my mother. “If
he’d
feel better and the baron agrees, I’m sure we can make arrangements with Frank.”
I asked the baron. “Tom could use the help,” he said.
“You don’t mind, sir?”
“No, actually I don’t. I appreciate the company after—” He squared a page on his desk.
“After Friedrich’s death?”
He nodded. My mother was jubilant. She astonished us all by hurrying into town and returning with a job at McClellan’s bakery. She’d
start before dawn and return by midafternoon in time to help Anna in the kitchen. The next day, she presented herself in the tower office and told the baron that she and my father would now pay rent.
“Frau Renner, considering your help in the kitchen and your husband’s with Tom, rent is quite unnecessary. In fact, I propose paying you both.”
“That would be welcome, but rent is necessary for
us
. We will not be beholden.” She stood immobile, arms at her sides. I knew that she’d win.
“I see. Then you may set a rent that seems appropriate. I will expect it on the first of each month.”
“Thank you, sir. However, I’ll need Hazel’s assistance to settle our affairs in Pittsburgh.”
“This is a difficult period, Frau Renner.” She didn’t move. “Very well. Will three days be sufficient?”
“Yes, sir. I’d like to start tomorrow.”
When she left, the baron shook his head. “A remarkable woman.”
“Yes, she is.”
“It would be remarkable to have such a mother.” He cleared his throat. “However, we were discussing other matters, were we not?” This was my first glimmer of the Baroness von Richthofen. She was nothing like Katarina Renner.
By the next afternoon we were in Pittsburgh. My mother offered our flat to Frank and his wife, charged against his salary. Frank was delighted; they’d been living in his parents’ cramped three rooms. “When the little one comes,” he said, “I’ll have my family right overhead.”
He showed us how he wanted to rearrange the store, putting common items in the back so customers would have to pass displays of newer tools and gadgets. For women he’d offer better toasters, egg beaters, can openers, and irons. He proposed installing brighter lights
and changing the window displays every Monday. My mother agreed to everything. “All Mr. Renner’s personal things are here in boxes,” Frank said. “I put his German newspapers in the closet.”
“Good. One day he won’t have to hide them.”
We spent the evening with Uncle Willy and Tante Elise, who listened with wonder to tales of the castle and with concern that my father had measured off the dead in the Somme. “We miss you, but he’s better off away from Pittsburgh,” said Uncle Willy. “We’ve stopped speaking German on the street. It’s come to this.”
“We can hope for peace in 1917,” Tante Elise said. “And that we’ll all be together soon.”
In the morning we packed a trunk for the months ahead. I’d thought my mother would be slowed by memories, but she moved purposefully, gathering clothes, her mending basket and German scissors, my grandmother’s spaetzle maker and cookie press, a venerable cookbook that was a wedding present, our cuckoo clock, and best beer steins. Then we cleaned the flat for Frank and his wife, scrubbing out weeks of coal dust and grit. When we’d finished, my mother took off her apron. She didn’t shake it out the window as she always did, but crammed it in a garbage pail we’d take downstairs. “It’s been so good not to wear that thing every day.”
“You don’t
like
cleaning?” I asked in astonishment.
“Cleaning is what you
do
. Cooking is what I love. You didn’t know that?”
How could I? She’d never shared such thoughts with me. “Will you miss the flat?”
She looked around at our oak chairs, satiny with use, the worn floors and shelves for her few treasures, and the door to their bedroom. “I’ll miss the good times, but right now, it’s better for your father in Dogwood.”
“I hope so.”
“Well, let’s go,” she said briskly, not once looking back.
I
N
D
OGWOOD, ONE
of the baron’s clients had commissioned a pressed tin ceiling for his music room. My father worked early and late on the project. “The tapping makes me a little crazy,” Tom confessed at breakfast.
“At least it’s not pictures of the dead.”
“That’s true. If he gets more commissions, he might not have time for the dead. Anyway, come and look outside. There was an ice storm last night.” We peered through a diamond-cut window at sunlight on ice-coated branches under a sheer blue sky. With the scene before me and Tom at my back, all was beauty and peace that morning.
At the bakery, my mother gave American names to her German Christmas cookies, delighting customers with hazelnut macaroons, almond crescents, and angel eyes. At home, she helped Anna bake loaves of fruit-studded
Christstollen
for the castle and the baron’s friends in New York. Mrs. McClellan said she couldn’t risk selling stollen: “It’s too German.” She’d offer only English fruitcake.
“Which nobody will eat,” my mother predicted. “How could they?”
Gentle snow enfolded us after the candlelight service on Christmas Eve. If only this peace would circle the world. In the small dining room we feasted on roast goose and potatoes, kale, Brussels sprouts and cabbage, bread, trays of cookies, and
Christstollen.
Flushed with wine, the baron was almost jovial. “King George of England would gladly trade his fruitcakes for a slice of your stollen, Frau Renner.”
In our put-together family, we sang and my father told a country tale, creating voices for witches and young maidens. I translated for Tom. With this slight excuse, we moved our chairs close together; our shoulders sealed as I whispered in his ear. Snow swirled outside,
but inside we were safe, warm, and far from trouble. Up in the tower office sat a beautifully bound edition of Martin Luther’s writings, just arrived, a lovely Monet watercolor, and a Corot landscape in which palpable sunlight stroked folds of earth as soft as flesh. In the museum where it was bound, hundreds would find comfort here. Surely we were doing the work of peace.
But that night in my room, my head spun with rich food, red wine, and schnapps. Wind blew icy snow against the window like pebbles. In their room down the hall, my father would hear this rattle. Would he count the pings on glass and compare them to casualties? Wandering in the mirror gallery as he often did, was he imagining infinite rows of soldiers marching to their deaths? How simple I’d been to think the castle gate could shield us from the war. Faintly, behind the rattling snow, were those drumbeats bearing down on me as well?
O
N
J
ANUARY
31, 1917, Germany announced unrestricted submarine warfare against U.S. ships. The baron was utterly silent at his desk and I could barely work myself, making endless mistakes in copying until my wastebasket was full of paper wads. Four days later, Wilson severed diplomatic relations with Germany.
“
Now
things will change,” people said downtown. “
Now
the Kaiser’s met his match.” In fact, soon after, German troops withdrew to the Hindenburg Line along the Western Front. This was a “tactical” and “planned” maneuver, the German press claimed. “A shorter line is easier to defend,” the baron interpreted for me, “especially if you’re conserving munitions.” He looked out the window. “The Capodimonte is ready to ship?”
“The crate’s made. I’m helping Tom with the packing this afternoon.”
The massive bouquet of delicate Capodimonte porcelain flowers
would go by train and then truck over rough roads to a wealthy, eccentric widow in northern Michigan, an insatiable buyer of silk, porcelain, and painted flowers. “I wish she’d buy paintings,” Tom said. “Breathe on this wrong, and it breaks.” As we nudged the centerpiece into place and began the tedious work of padding, we couldn’t help speaking of the Hindenburg Line.
“A shorter line
is
easier to defend, but also easier to break,” Tom said thoughtfully. If he left Dogwood now to break it, how could I protest, after millions of women from dozens of countries had watched their men march off? If Tom was an unlikely soldier, so were these men. Some, like him, once held carpenter’s tools. Now they used machine guns.
“Let’s break the straw into shorter pieces near the petals,” I suggested.
“Yes, good idea.” Digging his hands into our straw, he found mine. Our fingers braided together. “Shorter pieces,” he whispered. “They’re so much better.” That moment of pleasure in straw was a precious memory in the coming weeks. My father had tacked a large map of Europe to the workroom wall. One afternoon I found him standing in front of it, transfixed. I wrapped my arm around the thinning waist. “What do you see?”
“Forests, rivers, gardens, castles, churches, orchards, villages, children playing, trenches, bodies blown apart, rats, craters, wasteland.”
“Perhaps you don’t need to read the paper every day.”
He looked at me in astonishment. “It’s my country.”
I sighed. Stacked beside us were the client’s finished ceiling plates. They were beautiful, some with musical instruments, others with flowers and vines. But my father’s eyes were fixed on the map. In the hall outside, Lilli barked, coming closer, with Tom’s boots clattering behind. She bounded in and sat at my feet, evidently fulfilling the order: “Find
Hazel.” The great tail swooshed with pleasure. “Good girl,” said Tom. “We started in the meadow and she found you here.” His cheerful energy felt so foreign, so American.
My father and I turned from the map like guilty children. At that moment, for the first time I noticed a pair of wooden crates stashed near my father’s workbench, brimming with tiny bits of tin. “What are they?” I asked. He didn’t answer and I asked again. They weren’t just scraps. Something here was too meticulous.
“Casualties from the Battle of the Somme,” he admitted. “I want to see what a million looks like. It’s not a million yet. I’m not finished. I may never finish.”
“Do you—”
“Yes, Hazel, I have to. It’s my penance for being in America.”
“Johannes,” said Tom quietly, “the client wants the plates today. Do you have the chart for installing them?”
“Yes, it’s here.”
“He has to be busy,” I told the baron. “Is there anyone else who might want ceiling plates?”
March 3, 1917. Through morning fog, I saw my father coming toward the castle, newspaper in hand. The baron was walking with Lilli. When they met, my father gave the paper to the baron. Then the two men walked out of view, shoulder to shoulder. At breakfast, we all learned that the German foreign secretary had made secret attempts to incite a Mexican attack on the United States. “It’s coming,” the baron said. “President Wilson
has
to respond. Watch.” I watched. America was a huge ship being launched from dry land. Supports are shifted, a pathway eased, and the great weight of the ship draws it into the water. Nothing could halt the slide to war.
I
n the next weeks, I tried to stay close to my father: taking walks, pulling him into discussions about new projects, or taking my drawing pad to where he worked. Passing his chair in the kitchen, I’d grip his shoulder. At the table, I brushed his hand when bringing coffee. Walking, I kept my hand on his arm, wanting every touch to say: “Whatever happens
over there
, I’m
here,
with you.”
April began with astonishing warmth. On April 5, I showed him the meadow that Tom had planted last fall with golden crocus, daffodils, and lapis-blue hyacinth around a copper beech tree. Flowering crab apples rimmed the clearing with frothy white. He stood still, breathing deeply. “A man could rest here and forget the world.”
“Let’s do that.” We sat on fresh grass, ringed by the golden cups, brushed by hyacinth perfume. I leaned against him. He seemed to breathe more easily. When a late afternoon breeze crossed the meadow, he set his hand on my cheek. “Thank you for bringing me here. But we should go back. Your mother will be worried.” We walked home together on our last day of peace.