Ursula Hegi The Burgdorf Cycle Boxed Set: Floating in My Mother's Palm, Stones from the River, The Vision of Emma Blau. Children and Fire (104 page)

And he saw more—
a small, stocky girl in a black dress whirling through the courtyard as if she were dancing or, perhaps, throwing a tantrum. Her skirt fans around her, and as her arms move in a windmill pattern, white-blonde hair flies around her face and shoulders. Graceful and robust, she spins around a fountain, face bursting through her hair only for flashes as if she were sculpting her own features that moment
. The boat swayed as Stefan stood up, one hand raised toward the shore to touch this child. He would search for her face in his daughters, but it wouldn’t be until his granddaughter Emma was born that he would recognize the girl he had seen from the boat.

With his poker money he rented the clapboard house by the lake and installed a used stove in the kitchen. In one of the upstairs rooms he set up a cot and a dresser for himself. He sold his stocks to buy good china and tablecloths, but saved on pots and other items that his customers wouldn’t see by bidding for them at auctions. After he built tile counters, he hired a waiter and opened a small restaurant, a French restaurant of course, much appreciated by the French-Canadians in Winnipesaukee. But most of the townspeople asked him why he wasn’t running a German restaurant. And the name, they said, was hard to remember—
Cadeau du Lac
—even after he told them it meant Gift of the Lake. Why couldn’t he just call it that? Besides, it was too fancy, they complained, too expensive. They’d speculate about where he got his money because he used it so easily—his own as well as theirs—yet,
they’d arrive in their Sunday clothes to test the food at the
Cadeau du Lac
, and they’d go home with tales of Stefan’s oyster
soufflé
, his
cassoulet
, his
crêpes au chocolat
.

Still, they didn’t think his restaurant would last. After all, ordinary people didn’t spend their money eating out. Yet, they’d return with their friends, with relatives. It turned out that the tourists were his best customers, already in the mood to spend from the moment they arrived on the Boston and Maine Railroad in their city clothes and loaded their fishing rods and beach umbrellas and sand pails and dogs and croquet sets into the horse-drawn cabs that would take them from the station to the hotels, the small cottages along the lake, or to the marina from where they could get a boat to the islands. Though most of the cottages were small, others were more substantial with lawns and porches and docks. A few even had boathouses or floating gazebos.

New Hampshire was not at all the way Stefan had imagined America back in Germany. No tall buildings like those in New York. No buffaloes. It reminded him much more of Germany with its small towns, except that forests here were denser, mountains higher, and the lake larger than any he’d seen before. Stone walls, flecked with lichen and moss, fenced in cattle and sheep. Some of the farmers in town liked to say their land grew rocks. After clearing their fields and meadows, they could always expect to find more rocks in the spring when the ground, upon thawing, heaved them to the surface as if giving birth to them. Early crop, the farmers called these rocks, and they’d pile them on the low stone walls that marked their boundaries. Building these walls continued every year and was hard work, as hard as bringing ice in from the lake. His first winter in Winnipesaukee, Stefan learned to cut slabs of ice from the lake, drag them to shore on a sled, and store them beneath layers of sawdust in the icehouse that was built into the earth against the side of the foundation.

By April, the hair on his arms finally began to grow again, though not black and curly as it had been, but reddish as though it held the memory of fire, and it would never grow beyond a stubble that felt coarse to the touch. In May he offered to buy the building
from its owner, a widow in her eighties who still had all her teeth, and when she refused to sell, he purchased a porcelain statue of St. Joseph, about a foot tall with a brown porcelain coat and a patient smile that suggested eternal waiting. It was night when Stefan dug a hole into the hard earth next to the front steps of his restaurant, lowered the saint headfirst into the ground, and packed the hole with dirt. That’s how the nuns back home had come to own the land for their convent.

“Nuns can get any land they want,” his mother had told him when he was a small boy. “All they do is bury St. Joseph upside down.”

“Why?” Sitting on the edge of the table, he watched her as she kneaded dough, her forehead moist with sweat, a smudge of flour on her chin. She believed things were safest in the earth. She even had a burying box for her silverware—tin lined with wood—that she’d dig up for special occasions and then bury again behind their house as though it might grow roots and flourish. Multiply. But he’d never seen nuns bury anything. “Why?” he asked again.

“Because St. Joseph is known for his patience,” his mother said.

“But why upside down?”

“Because then the saint is uncomfortable and wants to work his way out.” As she leaned into the dough, her fists sank into the pale mound, folding it over, punching it down. “Once the nuns have their land, they make sure to dig St. Joseph back up again. Because he keeps working as long as he’s in the ground. You see, if you forget to take St. Joseph out, the land keeps going to new owners.”

His mother was more superstitious than anyone Stefan knew: scratches stopped hurting if you blew on them and then sang,
“Heile heile Segen, morgen gibt es Regen
…”—“Heal heal, blessings, tomorrow there’ll be rain …”; white spots beneath your fingernails revealed how many mortal sins you had committed; the small crab inside her amber necklace protected her from spider bites; and her favorite saying,
“wer sich das Zeug am Leibe flickt, der hat den ganzen Tag nicht Glück,”
meant that if you darned your clothes while you still wore them, you wouldn’t have luck that entire day.

Small towns fostered superstitions. And yet, ironically, after
crossing an ocean, Stefan had ended up in another small town with its own superstitions: if a bridegroom dropped the ring, it meant bad luck; if you had a cold, you should rub your feet with butter; if you bit your baby’s fingernails, it wouldn’t become a thief.

But it felt familiar to live in a town where, soon, he knew almost everyone: Frank Weber who owned the hardware store; Father Albin who placed the communion wafer on his tongue every Sunday; Clem Weeks who had his cigar stand on Main Street; Lucie Magill who’d just opened a store called Magill’s Fine Clothing; Jules Margaux, the lamplighter, who came down Main Street at dusk with his ladder to turn on the gas streetlights. Stefan wrote to Helene that he enjoyed walking through town and having people greet him by name, enjoyed welcoming them into his restaurant, which was already known for the finest meals around the lake.

Within a year, he dug up his St. Joseph and rinsed him off in soapy water because his landlady was moving to Boston to marry a coffin maker young enough to be her grandson, and she was eager to sell her building, along with the cornfield, for a price Stefan could afford. Some days he worked sixteen hours. He expanded his kitchen. Hired two more waiters. An assistant cook. A kitchen helper. By adding an enclosed porch that overhung the water, he doubled his seating capacity and gave his guests the illusion of floating above the lake. He liked to make decisions on his hunch of things to come. That was the American way, he explained to Helene Montag in a letter, to plan beyond the obvious. He wrote to her about becoming an American citizen. About the satisfaction of accomplishing something that you first just see in your mind and then make real by doing it.

To honor the porcelain saint, Stefan built him a shelf in the lobby, and when he climbed on the old piano bench he’d set beneath it and positioned the statue on the shelf so that St. Joseph could see everyone who entered the restaurant, he thought he heard the voice of the Hungarian.
“You’re far too lucky.”
Stefan spun toward the door. But he was alone, except for a hint of cinnamon and tobacco in the air and the Hungarian’s infectious laugh. “…
far too lucky
.”

The winter he was twenty-four, he married his first wife, Elizabeth Flynn, a flutist with delicate wrists whose pale hair covered her entire pillow at night. Though she’d never kissed a man before him, her fingernails were speckled with mortal sins and were so thin that they seemed transparent.

Stefan adored her small, bony face. Adored her extreme shyness that kept her from talking to people. Even adored the tenacity that replaced the shyness once she knew you well. When he built a fire escape and tiled the upstairs floors to block any flames that might start in the restaurant, Elizabeth decided she’d learn how to paper their walls. Though her parents objected, she stripped the bedroom walls by herself, covering them with bottle-green paper that was scattered with white roses—the same pattern she’d had in her childhood room. Since her fingernails kept breaking as she worked, she trimmed them close to the tips of her fingers. In the evenings guests in the restaurant would hear the haunting sound of her flute above them.

What Stefan did not adore about her was her mischievousness. She liked to hide things when he wasn’t looking: his toothbrush or his coffee cup or his slippers. She’d laugh, make him search, even though he’d grow irritated. “It’s childish,” he’d tell her and stalk off to his restaurant. Only to come home and find that she’d knotted the bottoms of his pajamas.

They used some of her dowry to order a birch armoire, bed, and two nighttables from a South German carpenter in Wolfeboro on the other side of the lake. Most afternoons Stefan would slip from the kitchen for a while, and they’d tumble onto their mattress and sink into the feather quilt, laughing as he’d peel her out of her petticoat and corset cover. Still, even here, he would stay aware of what needed to be done next in his restaurant—
dice carrots, marinate veal, sauté mushrooms, order sugar and olives
—while below them in the kitchen, his assistant cook and kitchen helper would stare at the ceiling, placing bets on how long the thudding of the bed would last.

“I’m so glad we met here in America,” he told her one evening.

In the light from the oil lamp, she ran one thumb around his ears, down the frown lines between his thick eyebrows. “Tell me why.”

“Because in Germany the president of a bank would never allow his daughter to marry the son of a tailor.”

“Fuck him then.”

“Don’t say that.”

But she liked to shock him by talking dirty, and it astounded him when she told him she’d gotten that way in college. “Women alone, locked away in a school… you’d be surprised what we talk about.”

That lewd side of hers made him feel he was guarding a secret whenever they were in public, and he’d wish for her shyness to come back. Still, knowing what she might say was exciting. Troubling. Certainly her parents didn’t know that side of her. They were polite. Formal. Sitting across from Elizabeth at her parents’ cherrywood dining table, Stefan would compliment her mother on how she’d decorated the ceiling fan with silk flowers, say, or with vines, while all along he’d be afraid his wife would say something vulgar, and that her parents would blame his influence on her.

He knew it meant entirely too much to him to be accepted by a wealthy family like hers, and that embarrassed him because it was so … German. He was in America now. Where everyone was equal. What embarrassed him too was that he couldn’t stop feeling proud when on Sundays after church, his in-laws would stroll with him and Elizabeth along the lake, his wife’s shoulders at the same height as his, her gloved hand floating in the bend of his arm, her Persian lamb coat with its seal collar shielding her from the cold. And if he sometimes felt irritated because Elizabeth would correct his pronunciation, even in bed, he would tell himself that it was to his advantage to shed his accent and sound like an educated man.