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 (106 page)

One afternoon, while Sara and Stefan made love, rain pelted his bedroom window, and after the rain stopped, they woke Greta from her nap and took her for a walk. At the edge of the schoolyard, they came across Elizabeth’s mother, breaking a white rose from one of the bushes that she and her husband had planted here where their daughter had gone to school—one bush for each year of her life. Though Father Albin—whose guidance Lelia Flynn sought out far too often, the townspeople said—had cautioned the Flynns that roses did not always survive the harsh New Hampshire winters, they’d still planted them because Elizabeth used to love white roses; and they had done so without the help of their gardener or even the principal who had offered to assist them when he’d seen them out there in their expensive clothes, wielding shovels, awkward and determined. Despite the priest’s warning, the tender shrubs had already made it through their first winter and were thriving, forming what was to become a lush hedge between the playground and the lumberyard across the street.

When Mrs. Flynn noticed Sara with Stefan, she stood with the stem in her fingers as if she’d been caught taking something that didn’t belong to her. “Stefan,” she said. “Stefan?” Her eyelashes fluttered for an instant. “Greta.”

The air was still so moist that Sara felt it wet against her face, her neck, between her thighs that still held the memory of Stefan’s body. And what had felt right when she’d lain with him, felt like sin now that she was standing in front of his dead wife’s mother. “Let me wrap your flower,” she offered and unfolded her handkerchief, dipped it into a shallow puddle. “It’ll be fresh when you get it home.”

Lelia Flynn glanced at Stefan, then at Greta who clutched a blue fold of Sara’s skirt.

“It’s clean, the handkerchief,” Sara said.

“Oh—it’s not that.” Lelia Flynn extended her rose.

When Stefan tried to introduce the two women to each other, Sara said quietly, “Mrs. Flynn knows me from the bakery.” Carefully she wound her wet handkerchief around the stem.

“Thank you. I will have this washed so I can give it back to you next Sunday.”

“Sunday?”

“When my son-in-law brings you to my house.”

Sara frowned.

“I did not intend to imply that you should feel honored to be—” Lelia Flynn sounded flustered.

Stefan watched Sara, impressed that she was
not
impressed at being invited by the banker’s wife.

Lelia shook her head. “What I wanted to say was that I would be honored if you came to my house. Father Albin will be there too.”

From then on Sara was invited along every Sunday and sat at the table that Lelia would decorate with settings of varied height, three-tiered silver trays with petit fours, glass bowls spilling grapes and plums and bananas, strawberries scattered in deliberate disorder on the tablecloth between the candlesticks and bud vases. By the time Sara married Stefan—almost exactly two years after Elizabeth’s death—Lelia had grown so fond of her that she gave her an exquisite set of Italian silver trays. At the reception that was held at Stefan’s restaurant, Sara propped Greta on the table next to the wedding cake and fed her icing right from her thumb.

While working in the restaurant kitchen, Sara often balanced the child on one hip while she measured ingredients. Though Stefan still arranged the final garnishes on his pastries, she prepared the crusts and fillings. He was careful not to mention his first wife in front of Sara, but he was constantly reminded of Elizabeth because her features were growing more pronounced in his daughter, whose gray eyes would settle themselves upon others, absorbing, memorizing. Most people felt uncomfortable and glanced away, but Sara laughed and swung Greta around in her arms, telling her not to be
so serious, unaware that the child was aching with the knowledge of Sara’s death.

She gave Greta crayons and sheets of butcher paper and hung up the stick figures the child drew for her. Two weeks before Sara became pregnant, Greta’s drawings took on pear-like curves that softened the silhouettes of her stick figures and contained another, smaller shape curled within the curve. Sometimes there’d be two shapes, not touching, one far tinier than the other as though it needed time to bring it to fruition.

When Sara hadn’t bled for two entire months, she took Greta to her parents’ bakery and left her with one of her sisters, while she walked along the lake by herself, the collar of her coat turned up. The water was choppy, and crests of foam bobbed above its lead-colored surface. The only boat out was the mail boat, its long, knotted ropes hanging from its hull. Wind snatched at the white haze that rose from the smokestack, and the sun bounced off the windows of the pilot house, brief flashes of light, as if a child were playing with a pocket mirror. There’d always been children to care for in her life … her siblings, and now Greta. Children she loved. But she couldn’t imagine herself with a child of her own.

She returned for a walk the following day and the days after that, returned till she was used to the idea of herself being a mother. And only then did she tell Stefan.

He stood in front of her like an awkward boy. “Are you happy then, are you?” Pressing her hands between his, he asked, “Are you?”

He took his best suit from the hanger and told her he’d be back soon; but instead of stopping at the construction site to supervise, he headed for the Catholic church, careful to avoid the deep mud. While the lower regions of the mountains had been turning green, their summits were still capped with snow, and spring thaw had left the roads of the town so spongy that carriages and delivery wagons had been getting stuck all week. Pete Morrell and some of the other farmers were earning extra money by keeping their teams of oxen ready for towing.

As Stefan approached the churchyard, a flock of swallows rose
from a puddle, forming a cone that spun upward and was sucked into the mild, damp wind. On the church steps, he scraped the wet earth from his shoes before he entered. The oxblood-colored curtain of the confessional enveloped him like an embrace of shame, and after Father Albin’s raspy voice absolved him from years of sins—pride and greed among them—Stefan knelt by the side altar, where the statue of the Virgin cradled the waxen corpse of Christ. There, as he remembered the banker’s words—
money I give to the church has nothing to do with the church
—he proposed his own deal to God: he would attend church every Sunday, sing in the choir, and contribute ten percent of his income
if
Sara and the child survived.

“And future children,” he made sure to remind God.

The construction of the
Wasserburg
was progressing, and the town had become accustomed to the sight of Stefan’s short, solid body—always in a dark suit and crisp white shirt—as he strode among the workmen with blueprints from the linen originals, issuing orders in an accent that sounded both stern and melodious to the townspeople, who still whispered about him as much as the day he’d arrived: that he had a way with money; that he looked like a Frenchman—not a German—with those black curls and fierce green eyes; that the bathrooms in his apartment house would be divided—toilet and a sink in one room, tub and sink in another. At a town meeting some complained that his building blocked their view of the lake, while others speculated that it was too big to ever fill with tenants.

But what they talked about most was that the fire inspector had said it was ten times as safe as any other structure in town. “Goddamn thing’s so heavy,” he’d muttered, “it’s anchored right to the middle of the earth.”

Between each floor were ten inches of cement, ten inches of sand, and another ten inches of cement—an impenetrable fire barrier. The outer walls were built of brick and heavy timber, while the inside walls had masonry between layers of plaster.

Sara preferred their rooms above the restaurant and felt uneasy with the growing debt. “A banker’s taste,” she called the
Wasserburg
late one evening when she and Stefan were sharing a custard tart from the restaurant as they often did before they went to bed.

“And what would you want?” he challenged her. “A baker’s taste?”

She took a small bite, set the tart back on the plate between them, and chewed slowly before answering him. “Tell me then—what is wrong with a baker’s taste?”

“I’m sorry.”

Both elbows on the tablecloth, she leaned toward him. “I like the baker’s taste.”

“I said I’m sorry.” He dabbed one finger against the side of her mouth. Smiled at her. “You got custard on your face,” he said and licked off his finger.

“And the farmer’s taste. And the chimney sweep’s taste. This entire town is built in that kind of taste. It suits me. The house you’re building does not fit into this town.”

“It’s the most beautiful house I’ve ever seen.”

“Oh, Stefan. Of course it’s beautiful. But it’s so large that it changes the way the other houses look … so large that I get embarrassed.”

“Embarrassed?”

“It’s like … bragging, a house like that.”

“Not to me. And you knew. … You knew from the beginning that I was building it.”

“But I didn’t know how much it lived inside you. With something that big there isn’t much room left. And what’s left is still taken up by her.”

“So that’s what all this is about? About Elizabeth?”

She looked straight at him. “It’s her name that’s still on the deeds.”

“I told you I would change them over to you. I just haven’t had time.”
Marjoram
, he reminded himself.
I’m also running low on pepper. Plenty of paprika left, though, and salt
.

“And you did nothing to stop her mother when she ordered me to visit.”

“I thought you like visiting there.”

“I go because of Greta and you. But when I’m there, I still feel like someone who stole you from their daughter.”

“Elizabeth was dead before you and I—” He stopped. Be patient, he reminded himself. Patient. He kissed her forehead. “The Flynns are always kind to you.”

“They are. The way they would be to a servant. Because I’m from trade.”

To agree with her would mean admitting that equality was not as total in America as he had figured it was, and letting in the uneasy certainty that Elizabeth’s parents had never really accepted him either. “No. It’s because they’re both generous people.”

“The kind of generosity that comes with conditions.”

“They’ve never pushed me for the loan.”

“Because you’re the father of their grandchild.”

“I don’t understand you,” he said, feeling this one chafing hurt between them that he’d sensed before, though it had never risen like this in words. To reassure Sara, he added, “It’s you I’m married with.” Right away he knew he should have said married
to
. Elizabeth would have mentioned his mistake. But Sara didn’t even know enough to notice.

The morning he felt movement beneath the swelling of her belly, he went to mass though it wasn’t a Sunday, and when Father Albin’s wide, pink hand floated up to bless the congregation, Stefan felt a deep conviction that God would keep Sara alive. Still, the evening her labor began, he was snagged right back to the night of his first wife’s death. Sara’s screams were ripping through him, and when he tried to get into the room where her mother and Dr. Miles bent over her in the wide birch bed, they kept him from her and sent him to look after Greta who was alone in her room.

When he opened her door, his daughter was crouching against the wall in the far corner of her bed, legs drawn to her chest.
“Fröschken,”
he whispered.
“Fröschken?”

A gingham pillow was crammed in the tight space between her knees and stomach as though she, too, were giving birth. When he picked her up, she was shivering so hard that he knew those final
screams of her mother had survived in her memory. Touching his lips to Greta’s forehead, he wished he could reassure her that Sara would soon be well again, but since he didn’t know how to ease his own fears, he was silent as he guided her arms into the sleeves of her checkered coat and tied the ribbon of her matching hat beneath her chin. After he buttoned her shoes, he lifted her on his shoulders, and as he walked along the dark lake with her, she linked her fingers across his forehead, preserving the heat of his skin in her palms. Autumn wind molded the trees to the shoreline, their branches reaching for the restless surface of the lake with the promise of a diviner’s rod.