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 (118 page)

“What is this?” he said and then laughed, flustered, and said her name as if to remind her who she was—“Lenchen,” he said, “Helene”—but already he was raising his face toward hers as she weighed him down with her breasts and her belly, crushed herself against him till his body thrashed to meet hers, escape into her though he twisted away before she could fill herself with him.

She didn’t trust herself to look at him the next morning while they got ready for the tenants’ Christmas party in the lobby. And it wasn’t just her face that was hot, but her entire body. The worst ever: endless waves of red waiting beneath her skin to betray her, to spill up across her chest, her arms, her neck. She busied herself with the children, making sure to have at least one of them with her at all times so that she and Stefan could not possibly talk. Relieved when he left to roast two dozen chickens in his restaurant oven, she fussed with her platters of German potato salad and cold cuts, garnishing them with radish crowns and slices of boiled eggs the way Frau Blau had taught her and Margret. She didn’t see Stefan again until it was time to set everything up in the lobby, and then she kept her eyes on the white paper cuffs that he’d slipped around the ends of the crisp drumsticks.

As she moved about the linen-covered tables and made sure all the tenants had plenty of food, she felt the presence of the night between her and Stefan. No, she did not have a fever, she told several of the tenants who commented on her flushed cheeks, and she distracted them by asking about their families, their work. Most of them she knew quite well by now: they’d welcomed her last summer, and some liked to deliver their rent checks to her door instead
of leaving them in the mailbox. Nate Bloom—as usual he’d brought champagne and his latest girlfriend—was talking to Mrs. Braddock from the second floor while Mr. Braddock was feeding a bottle to their daughter Fanny. With her slack features and placid eyes, the little girl always looked as if she were grinning. “Something’s not right about her,” the tenants would say. Fanny couldn’t sit up yet by herself, although she was the same age as Tobias, who’d recently learned to walk and would fiercely attach himself to Helene’s hand or whatever part of clothing he could get hold of—a little bur—and straggle along.

“Join us,” the tenants told Helene. They whispered to each other how lively the third Mrs. Blau looked today, and how much easier the language seemed to come to her. “Join us and eat, please. Everything is so delicious.”

But she kept flitting about, ladling two kinds of punch—spiked with rum for the grownups, plain for the children—and to keep from blushing, she tried to distract herself by fretting about candles and about how much she would miss real candles on the tree next year and in the years to come, because that’s what she was used to as far back as she could remember,
candles, real candles, that’s what I grew up with, real candles, lots of candles. …
From across the lobby she felt her husband watching her, felt her skin, her entire body flush blazing hot until she was the candle, the only candle allowed.
Allowed?
She moved away from his gaze, found Mr. Bell, urged him to play Christmas carols on his violin. “For the children,” she said, “oh, please,” and thought she heard Stefan cry out
please
in the dark,
please
, and then Mrs. Evans was slicing the fruitcake she’d brought, a moist loaf studded with fragments of red,
please
, while Miss Garland led the children in “Silent Night,” a melody Helene knew well, and as she sang along the words she’d learned as a girl—“
Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht…
.”—another voice picked up those same words behind her, came closer, closer yet, but she didn’t have to turn to know it belonged to her husband,
please oh please
, and as he held her there with his voice, held both of them, she let her voice fuse with his and felt the blushing surge downward, not up, down, down to her groin,
please
, hot and wicked and pleasurable all at once.

After that, blushing was never quite the same again. Now that she knew how to take that panic—I’
m going to blush
—and redirect it to where it met her rapture, she could gather it at will—
now … down
—send it there. She began to think of her orgasms as blushing, began to welcome that hot rush that used to mortify her. Amazing how powerful it could make you feel.
And no one else knows. Or has to know
. All you had to do was think
no, I don’t want to blush, no
—and that familiar heat would rise through you. After that, it was yours. To send where you wanted it. And you didn’t even have to touch yourself.

It could happen at the grocery store. At the beach. In the laundry room. At Magill’s Fine Clothing. In church even. Helene liked to play with how high she’d let the blush rise. If you sent it down too soon, its pulse faded quickly. The trick was to let it wash up beyond your waist, to trap it as it raced across your breasts red hot and then—before it spent itself on your neck and face—to force it down.
Yours. Alone
.

For this you did not need a husband
.

Knowing this way to pleasure herself made it bearable for Helene when Stefan broke away so quickly after reaching for her at night. Though she longed for children of her own, she knew it was too soon. Being a mother to Stefan’s children was the hardest work she had ever done. She used to feel far more competent teaching a class of twenty. Still, sometimes she would let herself fantasize about having babies, speculating in what ways they would resemble both her and Stefan. She could see parts of him in his children: Greta had his slender nose and could be quietly observant like he; Tobias had his black hair and tenacity.

But whenever she tried to talk to Stefan about having a child of her own, he’d grow quiet.

No
need to rush him
.

Or myself
.

There will be time
.

And till then she had plenty to do. Starting with manners. American table manners, she thought, were atrocious, and even Stefan, who’d learned the proper ways as a boy, had become careless. But
already she’d noticed a change in him. He’d watched her teach Greta how to behave. To say
thank you
. “No elbows on the table,” Helene would coach her. “Only your wrists.” Though Greta was old enough to hold her knife in her right hand and her fork in her left, all this was too soon, of course, for Tobias. He wasn’t even toilet trained yet. At home, Helene knew, she would have started him at six months, the way her mother and grandmother had done before her.

Often Helene felt tired at the thought of all the other work she had waiting for her, not only in the apartment, but also in the garden above the garage, where she trimmed bushes and planted camomile along with flowers that reminded her of home: tulips and geraniums, snapdragons and pansies. And this was how Emma would remember her grandmother many years later—kneeling in the rich dirt between the flower beds, half moons of earth under her fingernails. She would remember the clean scent of soap as her grandmother scrubbed her hands in the kitchen with a bristle brush, remember her Aunt Greta’s stories of playing in the elevated garden with Uncle Tobias, gathering empty beechnuts that the squirrels left on the paths and heaping them into pyramids that they stabilized with earth and water.

It was impossible to adore a wife whose shoulders stood a hand’s width above yours, who looked down into your eyes instead of looking up at you, who had known you when your nose used to be runny, when you’d come home muddy after playing in the brook. But it was good to depend on her competence. To value her dignity. To admire her brilliant mind. The least he could do to protect her was curb his lust. And so he surrounded her with possessions instead—crystal bedroom lamps with candle-shaped lights, a set of the finest silver, Persian rugs—but Helene would have given up all that to be adored by him. He suspected that her love was larger than his, and he felt uneasy because his feelings were unequal to hers.

When the people of Winnipesaukee complimented him on his children’s manners, he felt proud. Though he never went back to church, he approved that Helene took the children there, and he tolerated that she invited Father Albin to dinner once a month to
please Lelia Flynn. Ever since Hardy Flynn had died from heart problems, Lelia had taken to arriving at the
Wasserburg
right after mass, and it cheered her to sit next to the priest whose heavy thighs strained against his cassock. She’d ask him how he’d come up with the thoughts for that morning’s sermon, and they’d end up discussing his kidney stones and her arthritis. It gave Stefan a certain pleasure, the priest coming to his house like that.
The house of God. The house of Stefan. Blasphemy
.

About those nights she took him, he and Helene never spoke. Both acted as if those nights didn’t happen between them. And yet they did—though not often. And never when they felt close to each other. The only times Helene could forget herself like this—forget everything she had been taught about marriage and manners—was when she got angry with him because he felt far away from her, say, or had waited too long to reach for her. And though it bewildered her—being this brazen and powerful woman, so unlike anyone she used to encounter in her fantasies—she felt exhilarated because this woman was someone she would have liked to be at times, this woman who didn’t care about being proper, this woman who laughed with ease and took what she wanted.

Those nights—they shocked and aroused Stefan, made him feel oddly virile and yet helpless. Though he didn’t understand what was happening—
a lady never indulges like that
—he did not want Helene to stop. Had Elizabeth or Sara chosen to force themselves upon him—
not that they would, not that they ever would
—he could have lifted them from him in one simple motion. But Helene was too strong, too heavy. Helene was broad in the hips and shoulders. Helene was agile. Dangerous perhaps.

At work while seasoning bouillabaisse or brushing raspberry glaze on his marzipan cake, he would catch himself wondering if he could win against her were she ever to wrestle him in earnest.

But of course that was an absurd thought
.

Something to dismiss as soon as it stirred you
.

Because what kind of husband would wrestle with his wife?

Those nights, they never happened when he reached for her, but if she turned from him silently—hurt or angry about one thing or
another again—he might awaken to discover her above him, blocking the moon as she crushed him into the mattress.

From there, of course, it became easy to figure out how to get her there.

Because that’s what he began to crave, really, secretly—to have her take him. To have it happen and then not speak about it. And he could prolong his excitement by watching her the following day, and by letting her catch him watching her for signs of what had gone on between them, while he’d wait for the familiar red to stain her neck and face. But that flush of embarrassment occurred less and less, and then only for an instant, while her eyes half closed and her lips curved upward, mystifying him.