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 (115 page)

While Helene craved words that fit her thoughts, words that didn’t feel so unfamiliar, the people of Winnipesaukee mistook her silence for snobbery; they saw her as a proud woman who kept herself apart from them; they didn’t understand that she’d always seen herself as smart, capable, and now felt frustrated in her new language where she could barely make herself known; they had no
idea how confused she was by their lack of formality. Americans told her, “I’ll see you,” and she wanted to ask,
“When?”
But then they didn’t visit. Was it because she didn’t respond properly?

Though she’d studied English in school, it was much harder speaking the language than reading or hearing it. Often she’d feel so slow that she’d stay silent rather than risk not being understood. “Huh?” people would ask, and if she’d repeat what she’d just said, they’d ask again, forcing her to repeat herself three or four times until she was whispering with embarrassment.

It made her feel different, made her think how—although everyone carried some difference just by the separation of skin from others—that became magnified when you were an immigrant, when there were more details to set you apart. Language, for one. And then of course the experience of having grown up a certain way. Here in America she felt more German than she had back home. Because here she stood out. She envied her husband who blended in because he’d come to this country as a boy.

At home, they only spoke German.

One afternoon when she took the children for their daily
Spaziergang
—walk—Tobias in his carriage with Greta holding on to the side as usual, she saw a group of small boys—all of them hunchbacked—chasing a ball around the playground of the granite school building. Their legs were knobby around the knees. Choked with pity, Helene stopped by the rose hedge. How could there be so many of them in one small town when all of Burgdorf had only one hunchbacked man? But at least the parents of these unfortunate boys had brought them together in a game where they were all alike and would not be teased by healthy children. It made her appreciate America, that magnitude of concern. Grateful that her stepchildren’s bodies were not deformed, she bent to kiss the tops of their heads.

At the dinner table, she added a prayer for the hunchbacked boys and their parents.

“Hunchbacked boys?” Stefan spooned mashed potatoes onto Greta’s plate.

“You must have seen them before. There were nine of them. Their legs were all swollen around the knees.”

“Here in town? I haven’t seen a single one.”

“Their heads were covered with little helmets. To protect them, I guess. They were playing with a ball, kicking it and—” Stefan started to laugh.

She stared at him. It was the first time she’d seen him laugh. She’d seen him smile through his grief—always through his grief—and she’d respected that; but now he was laughing. And about this? Someone else’s misfortune? “I don’t know you at all,” she said.

“Lenchen. …” He wiped his eyes. “It’s padding they put on. To play football. So they won’t get hurt. It’s a rough game.”

“Of course,” she said slowly, feeling drained by her worries about those children.

“Don’t feel foolish. Everyone who comes here from another country has stories like that. Of not understanding. Hey…” He covered her hand with his. “It’s funny.”

But it was only when Greta said, “Fun-ny … fun-ny …,” slapping the back of her spoon into her mashed potatoes with each syllable, that Helene could join in the laughter.

After that, laughter seemed to happen easier between her and Stefan. When Stefan gave a reception in the lobby of the
Wasserburg
to introduce her to his tenants, Nate Bloom arrived with four bottles of champagne and a young woman whose hat was decorated with silk peonies and the feathers of songbirds. “This here’s Eileen,” he said. “My girlfriend.”

Stefan led them to the buffet table where two of his waiters were serving the food he’d prepared in his restaurant. Beeswax candles and tall vases with gladiolas were set up on either end of the long table.

Eileen’s left hand shot out toward a tray with hors d’oeuvres, but instantly she pulled her thin fingers back as if against their will. “Do any of these have shrimps in them?”

“I do not know,” Helene said.

Eileen frowned at her. “Huh?”

“My wife said she does not know,” Stefan said, “but I can assure you that I didn’t use any shrimps today.”

Still, she hesitated. “But have there been shrimps on any of these serving plates before?”

For an instant he observed her without speaking, but then he said in his most polite voice, the one reserved for difficult guests, “I’m in the habit of using clean plates.”

“I didn’t question your habits.”

“Honey…” Nate circled one arm around her shoulders. “Honey, why don’t we just have a glass of champagne for now? We both know that agrees with you.”

“Please. I’m trying to tell you that I even get a reaction if I eat from a plate that had shrimps on it hours before.”

“What exactly happens?” Stefan encouraged her.

“My breathing passages close up. And I get hives all over.”

“Is that so?”

“And I have been known to collapse.”

“You mean you can’t speak at all when that happens?” He managed to sound concerned.

But Helene could tell he was close to laughing. And so was she. Bringing her lips close to his ear, she whispered in German, “Let’s feed her some shrimps then, quickly.”

When Mr. Bell, the retired lawyer, started playing his violin, Nate led his girlfriend toward the double door in back of the lobby. “Let me show you the lake, honey.”

As the party spilled out toward the dock, a few of the children got their swimsuits and ran into the water.

Mr. and Mrs. Evans from the fourth floor pulled Helene aside. “We brought you American pralines,” Mr. Evans said and handed her a red velvet box much prettier than any box she’d seen in Germany.

But when she passed them around and tasted one herself, it was too sweet for her, too soft. Still, she managed to thank them without lying. “My first American pralines,” she said in her halting English.

“I am so glad you like them.” Mrs. Evans was leaning on a cane though she was barely forty.

“Some of the other girls from the building will join us in a while,” her husband told Helene.

She was amazed when those girls turned out to be women older than she. One of them had a tiny face with fine, silky creases so stretched that her eyes protruded. That tautness was there in her movements too, as if her entire body had been compressed.

“Welcome to our building,” she said as if she were one of its owners and presented Helene with a red cake tin that was filled with peanut brittle. “I’m Miss Garland, and I made this for you. For this occasion.”

“Thank you,” Helene said, trying to touch the back of her teeth with her tongue so that it wouldn’t sound like
zank you
.

“You may keep the container.”

“Thank you.”

“Those wasps again,” Mr. Evans said and swatted at the air.

“I’ve always been fond of Germany,” Miss Garland said. “My fiancé traveled widely in Germany as a boy, and he said he’d like to take me there on our honeymoon.”

Helene saw Miss Garland
arm in arm with a dapper, old man, standing by the railing of an excursion boat… eating dinner at a linen-covered table on the terrace of the Kaisershafen Gasthaus high above the Rhein, where he pours Mosel wine into her glass, leans toward her voice. …
How splendid, Helene thought, that here in America people can marry so late in life. It made her feel like a young bride. Through the open door, sun and the voices of children streamed into the lobby, and far out on the lake the striped sails of a boat filled up with light.

“I hope you will like it in Germany,” Helene told Miss Garland.

“Oh, but you don’t understand … The wedding, it was all set, but—”

“He departed,” Mr. Evans said.

“Died,” his wife corrected him. “Buried. Gone.”

Stunned by the lack of compassion, Helene turned to Miss Garland. “I am very very sorry. And that it should happen now.”

Miss Garland blinked. “Now?”

“When you go to your … how do you say? … weddingmoon.”

“Honeymoon. Except that my fiancé died forty-four years ago.”

“But—”

“He died young, and he died tragically. A riding accident. Some
people—” She frowned at Mr. and Mrs. Evans. “—may think it foolish that there’s not a day I don’t think about him.”

“Oh, but it is not foolish,” Helene said fervently, wishing she could express herself better.

Miss Garland felt a satisfying moment of connection to the new Mrs. Blau because she could tell that Helene, too, had experienced the longing that was so familiar to her. “Tell me about him,” she said.

“It is not like that,” Helene said quickly. She didn’t want to let Miss Garland or any of the other tenants see how confusing it felt to be the third wife of a man who still carried his other wives with him. For Stefan, she would have liked to be flamboyant and glamorous, the type of woman who’d capture his passion and make it equal to her own, who’d make him forget any other woman. Lying next to him at night, she’d curse her pride that made it unthinkable to reach for him first, to stroke his hairy chest and thighs and back and tell him of the love she had carried for him all those years. Marriage, she had believed, would make it possible to express that love. But Stefan never spoke of love. He’d signal what he wanted by laying one palm on her belly but then—determined to not lose her in childbirth—would separate himself from her all too soon, condemning her with that lightness, that absence of flesh that left her only with the weight of her love.

But at least I’m capable of that kind of love
. It was a magnificent love, she knew, a stubborn love; and she would try to ease her pain by imagining herself decades away, an old woman who’d feel compassion for the husband who had shunned a love like that without understanding what he had forgone.

Many nights after he had escaped from her into sleep, leaving her with a loneliness greater than any she had known while lying alone in her bed in Burgdorf, she would slip from beneath the covers, fill the deep tub in the marble bathroom, and let the warm water surround her, permeate her the way her husband would not. Stretched to her full length, the back of her head resting against a folded towel, she’d read German novels that her eyes could follow without the barrier of translation. Sometimes, though, she’d simply lie there, tears blurring the outlines of the hexagonal tiles, and as
the water around her cooled, she’d flip up the hot faucet with her toes, astonished by the luxury of it all. In Germany she used to stoke the tall stove next to the tub and wait for it to heat; but in her husband’s house, she could take a bath any hour of the day.
Or night. And he won’t even notice I’m gone
. As she’d step out of the tub, the amber lamp in the ceiling would cast her into a soothing halo, and in the mirror above the porcelain sink her face would look like that of a woman accustomed to being caressed.
The irony of it
.

Tell me about him
, Miss Garland wanted to ask again; but she postponed her curiosity, filed it away for later. “I believe my fiancé must have known he wouldn’t be here for long. You see—” Her voice receded.

When Helene leaned forward to hear better, she saw tears in Miss Garland’s eyes.

“He wrote me into his will the morning of the accident. Just hours before he—”

“Do not make yourself sad by telling.”

“He wanted me to have a certain life.”

“He was a … how do you say? … considerate man.”

“Most considerate.”

“Dear? Dear, I believe you have other guests,” Mrs. Evans reminded Helene.

“And he was very well to do.” Miss Garland glared at Mrs. Evans. “Poor white trash,” she whispered to Helene, “from Maine. Grew up in a one-room shack and figured she’d marry the most ambitious man she could find. You come to me if you ever have questions about the other tenants. Or about the building.”

Late that evening, after their guests had left, Helene and Stefan walked to the end of the dock, untied their shoes, and let the black water slap against their bare feet. They were laughing as they outdid each other with ideas for shrimp recipes they could feed Nate Bloom’s girlfriend.

“Shrimp Louis.”

“Shrimp salad.”

“Shrimp bisque.” He leaned against her, and when she shifted,
he surprised her by resting his head on her lap, right out in the open where anyone who walked along the lake could see them.

“We’ll sauté shrimps for her in butter.”

“We’ll have to do it fast, though. Because Nate’s ladies never last.”

“What’s Miss Garland’s first name?”

“I don’t know. Maybe nobody knows.”

“She must have signed her lease with her full name.”

“All she wrote is ‘Miss Garland.’”

“She told me about her fiancé.”

“If there was a fiancé …”

“But it sounded so true.”

“It probably feels true to her.”

“I believed her.”

“People here say there’s never been anyone for her, that she’s worked all her life at the shoe factory.”