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 (105 page)

As soon as Elizabeth discovered she was pregnant, she urged Stefan to borrow money from her father’s bank to build his apartment house in the cornfield.

But Stefan was reluctant. “I figured on waiting until I’d saved enough from the restaurant.”

“That could take ten years,” she persisted.

Every evening she talked about it.

Every morning.

“That’s what banks are for,” she’d remind him.

It was her father who summoned Stefan to his bank and took him into his office, a suite of three rooms divided by velvet drapes that were tied open with silk tassels. “Sit,” Hardy Flynn said, “sit,” his voice high and impatient as he pointed Stefan toward an overstuffed leather chair, smooth and golden-brown.

The color of wealth
. Stefan sat down, knowing that one day he would buy a leather chair for himself in that color.

Hardy Flynn remained standing. His gray beard looked out of place in his pink, unlined face. “Take one of these.” He extended a silver box with cigars, lit one for himself, then Stefan’s. “A personal loan. That’s how I want to do it. Without interest, of course.”

“That wouldn’t be right.”

“What’s not right about me helping my daughter get ahead?” The banker stroked the forked ends of his beard. “What’s not right about you wanting the same for her?”

“I—”

“Elizabeth should not have to fill the lamps. She should not have to live in rooms full of cooking smells from your restaurant.”

“I didn’t know that bothered her.”

The banker crossed his arms in front of his wide chest. “Elizabeth is used to certain … comforts in her life.”

“Which I will provide for her.” The moment Stefan said it, he could see his wife’s broken fingernails and felt ashamed. Felt a sudden rage at the banker for knowing about the broken fingernails
and
his shame.

“Let me explain something to you. Money I give to the church has nothing to do with the church.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It has everything to do with what my wife needs. Lelia enjoys visiting with the priest—investigating her soul, Father Albin calls it—and he is generous with his time when it comes to the wealthy wives of this town.”

The back of Stefan’s neck felt itchy, his starched collar too tight. There was too much of everything in the banker’s office, the banker’s house. It all only emphasized the gap between Elizabeth and himself.

“With a loan from me, you can provide what my daughter needs
much sooner than you can on your own. I want you to think about my offer. Both your names on the deeds—for the house and the restaurant. With right of survivorship.”

To get away, Stefan promised, “I will think about it. A very generous offer,” he added on his way to the door.

But when he told Elizabeth, she misunderstood and assumed he had already accepted. She was so delighted that he felt miserable telling her about his misgivings.

“Misgivings?” She stared at him. “About what?”

“About borrowing money from your father.”

“But he offered.”

“I know. And it makes me feel selfish, expecting you to live above the restaurant. Especially now that you’ll have a child.”

“It should make you feel selfish … damn selfish.”

“I feel pushed. By you and your father.”

“You are.”

“I think of you wallpapering by yourself and—”

“I wasn’t pregnant then.” She grasped him by the arms. “Can’t we just celebrate? The loan and the baby?”

When he finally agreed, she bought him a present, a green rowboat. He found reasons not to use it: he was too busy; he was tired; the weather was not right. But by summer—the only summer the two of them would have together—she was taking him for moonlight outings on the lake. She’d line the bottom of the boat with pillows and bring a thermos filled with hot chocolate. As he’d point out the pattern of stars for her, they’d sit with their backs against one side of the boat, feet dangling across the other side.

Now that an architect was drawing up blueprints of the building with its thirty-six apartments, Stefan was glad he didn’t have to wait any longer, and it gave him pleasure to listen to his wife plan their own apartment on the sixth floor. The largest in the house, it was to take up one entire side of the U-shaped structure, with the living room and kitchen facing the lake. Elizabeth knew exactly what she was going to buy and described everything to him in vivid detail as if she were already living in those rooms with velvet sofas and chairs, white china with a border of golden leaves,
painted wicker baskets with asparagus ferns. But while the windows in her parents’ house were covered with lace curtains and brocade drapes, she planned to keep hers bare, their only backdrop the sky and mountains.

Those nights on the lake had a timelessness about them, infusing Stefan with a feeling of being totally at home, more certain than ever that he’d been meant to leave Burgdorf and come to this very place, and when he would remember those nights as an old man, they would seem to fill years of his life.

By November, when the workmen had erected the massive foundation, Elizabeth lay in a hard-breathing labor that took hold of her for forty-one hours and seized her life as her child pushed through her flesh. While the midwife, Mrs. West, pried the infant’s head and shoulders from its cooling grave, Stefan shook Elizabeth’s arm and cried out her name as though he believed he could jolt her back into life.

“Like a crazy man,” the midwife told Mr. Heflin when she bought salt and molasses from him the day before Elizabeth’s burial. “Stefan Blau shoved me from the room as soon as his wife was dead. Told me to never come back.”

“Like a crazy man,” Mr. Heflin told his sister-in-law who, in turn, repeated those words to others who climbed the path to the cemetery where Stefan stood with the infant pressed against his chest, though several of the women would have liked to relieve him of that burden.

The cemetery lay right at the edge of town on a plateau from where you could see most of the houses and, beyond them, the lake and white-capped mountains. A path with deep ruts—the outer ones from carriage wheels, the center rut from hooves—stopped about five hundred feet from the cemetery. There, you would leave your carriages and carry the coffins the final stretch, which was so steep that the old people of Winnipesaukee quite often didn’t make it up here for funerals of their family and friends. It was said that once you were very old, the one way to get up to the cemetery was if you were to die and get carried.

Between and around the graves, a lot of the pines and birches
had been cleared, and those that were left had moss hanging from their lower branches as if they were weeping. From a distance, these long, greenish strands looked airy and soft and swayed with the slightest wind; but if you happened to walk into one, it would feel coarse against your face, and you’d notice bits of bark woven into the moss along with specks of dust that looked like fleas.

Since winters were so cold that you couldn’t bury the bodies deeply enough in the frozen ground, all of the graves had stones piled on them to prevent animals from digging. Come spring, white flowers would sprout from between those stones, but at Elizabeth Blau’s funeral the only flowers were wooden tulips, three yellow and three red, that stuck in the mound of stones on the Heflins’ family plot. These stones had partly sunk into the earth, the smaller ones in the middle and the larger ones around the outside.

As Elizabeth’s mother stepped up against the edge of the cemetery, her heart went still because all she heard was the noise of the brook that came off the mountain behind the cemetery at a steep angle and tumbled in swirls of white toward the lake. She knew if she were to take a single step on the other path behind that plateau that brought you down to the brook, her skin would feel cooler as a hush of cold blossomed around her, drawing her downward toward its source. But she knew not to go there. Not now. And not for at least a year. People in town called it Brook-that-finishes-grieving because mourners had thrown themselves into its white fall after the loss of someone they had loved. They fretted especially about their children who were old enough but not wise enough to love, and who climbed down to hidden pockets of forest along the brook to do their loving in secrecy. It was a hazardous path. A path that some—who now lay beneath the earth—had returned to after their love had ended.

Elizabeth’s mother turned back to the grave of her daughter and circled her son-in-law’s wrist with her thin fingers. “Promise you won’t go near that brook,” she said.

The townspeople would look upon him with mercy, this foreigner who had become a widower after not even a full year of marriage, and they would pray for him and for Elizabeth’s parents who had brought up their one child with the best of everything they
could give her, only to lose her twice—first to marriage and now to death—the interval between those two passages so fleeting that they would fuse into one for the townspeople in the decades when the newborn girl would grow into a woman far older than her mother had ever been.

Elizabeth’s parents, who expected Stefan to turn from the child in his pain, offered to raise her in their house, but he thanked them and promised to bring their granddaughter for a visit every Sunday. When she was christened the week after her mother’s burial, he deliberated on names that were common in America and Germany, and he chose his sister’s name, Margret, but called his daughter Greta. Clearly, she was not the child he had envisioned dancing around the fountain. She was of delicate build like her mother, and her downy hair was the color of the stubble on his arms as though she had sprung from fire.

He hired a nurse for Greta, but in the late evenings he’d rock her on his knees, stunned by the absence of his wife’s current of words. It made him mute, that longing for her voice, and he found it unbearable to speak to his daughter in her mother’s language. But it eased him to talk to Greta in his native language that he’d rarely spoken in years, cradling her in one arm while she sucked on her bottle, her clear eyes on his face as if she could understand every word.

“Fröschken,”
he called her. Little frog.

And he pointed to himself.
“Vati,”
he said. Daddy.

When she was teething, he rubbed her gums with whiskey, and when that didn’t help, he climbed into the icehouse, where he scraped the sawdust from the top layer of ice, carried a large chunk with tongs to his kitchen, and chipped off long splinters for Greta to suck on. That summer she learned to swim before she could walk. With the lake right there, Stefan believed in preparing her for water so that it would never become a danger to her. As a boy, he’d swum in the Rhein with his father, and he took Greta into the water, one hand beneath her, the other holding her head above the shallow waves, keeping her safe the way his father had kept him safe, the way he would teach each of his children and grandchildren to swim.

After the year of mourning had passed, he began his careful search for a suitable mother for Greta. He noticed Sara Penn who worked behind the counter of her family’s bakery. The firstborn of eight children, Sara had looked after her sisters and brothers since she’d been tall enough to fry an egg without burning herself. She had what the people in Stefan’s hometown would have called
Schlafzimmeraugen
—bedroom eyes—with smooth, long eyelids that seemed always half closed. Although five years younger than Elizabeth, she seemed more like a woman while Elizabeth had remained a girl.

The summer of 1908 he began to invite her for walks with him and Greta, who’d toddle between them, gripping one of their fingers in each pudgy hand and linking them in that manner, breathing in the smells that identified them for her: tobacco and melted butter for her father; warm bread and rose water for Sara who wore dresses in shades of blue, ranging from indigo to pale blue, who had a long, easy stride and a dark braid that swung across one shoulder, who would hoist Greta on her hip as though she belonged there and carry her without effort, singing in her low voice.

Sara had firm hands that touched Stefan’s temples if his head ached and held on to his broad shoulders when he bent above her in his struggle to erase the features of Elizabeth which, too often, superimposed themselves upon Sara’s face.

Sara’s favorite possession was a lined notebook she’d filled as a schoolgirl with legends she’d heard, and Greta loved hearing about the first white settlers and the Winnipesaukee Indians, especially the one about the Indian princess, Ellacoya. As she’d listen to Sara’s words, pictures would shape inside her mind, pictures of Kona, the young chieftain who crossed the lake to court Ellacoya, pictures of Ellacoya’s father, the warrior Ahanton who said no to anyone who wanted to marry his daughter. Greta saw him attack Kona, saw the princess step between them. After the wedding Kona returned across the lake with his bride, and a storm nearly overturned the canoes. But all at once sun split the clouds, showing the way to safety. Ahanton called this the Smile of the Great Spirit—Winnipesaukee.

“That’s how our lake got its name,” Sara told Greta.

A gatherer by nature, she took Stefan and Greta to a slope on Belknap Mountain where blueberries grew in rich and deep-blue patches and showed them how, from up here, you could see the entire town the way it lay around the curved shoreline of the lake like the arm of a woman, hugging it closely. Its houses—some brick, but most white or gray clapboard—clustered around the three churches: Congregationalist, Baptist, and Catholic.