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 (119 page)

Some evenings after dinner Greta liked to seclude herself in the delivery box—a low compartment between the apartment and hallway for the delivery of milk, groceries, and newspapers. Each tenant had one, and its wooden doors could be unlatched from either the kitchen or hallway. Too tight for anyone but a child to fit in, the dark box was lined with metal and stayed cool even on the hottest of days. You frequently had to scour it to get rid of the sour smell that rose from spilled drops of milk. Greta didn’t mind the smell. Inside her cubicle, with both doors shut, she liked to play her mother’s flute, long notes that sounded like the calls of large birds flying through the night and made Helene wish she could follow her stepdaughter and shed the absurd habit of walking on earth in sensible shoes.

Eyes wide open in the dark, Greta would see translucent clouds against a silver sky, and her wooden flute would reel them in, those clouds, sucking their luster into the cubicle till it glowed. When Helene called for her—time to get ready for bed—Greta reversed her notes, releasing the clouds and the light to where they belonged, and as she emerged, face radiant, her pupils black pinpricks behind her glasses, Helene felt she had reclaimed her from a place far beyond the house. It made her want to treat Greta with special care—reverence almost—and offer her lavish refreshments as you would to an honored guest who has traveled a great distance and won’t stay for long.

A guest like Leo.

All that winter Helene looked forward to his visit, imagining the places she would show him and Gertrud. They were getting married the third Sunday of April, and for their wedding present Helene and Stefan had already sent them round-trip tickets to America on the
Kaiserin Auguste Victoria
, a German ocean liner with a winter garden and a grand staircase. But about a week before they were to start their trip, another ship sank on its first voyage to New York, and Leo sent a telegram, postponing the trip. “If it were just me, I would come anyhow, but Gertrud doesn’t feel safe.”

A letter followed. Gertrud, he wrote, had first wanted to go ahead with their trip even though some townspeople kept asking if she wasn’t afraid to cross the ocean, considering how even the best of ships could sink. “Stefan and Helene got there safely,” she told them. “I’m not worried.”

But then Herr Pastor Schüler had given a sermon about five thousand millionaires who had drowned when their ship rammed into an iceberg. “There’s a lesson in that for all of you,” he declared, and while he proceeded to preach about greed and icebergs that really turned out to be the fire of hell, the altar boys went around with their shiny collection plates.

After mass, when Leo pointed out to him that not five thousand, but twenty-two hundred people had been aboard the
Titanic
and that seven hundred had survived, the priest pretended not to hear.

“Such hubris. And they said even God himself couldn’t sink their ship,” he announced in his sermon voice, the kind of voice that allowed for no doubt when he spoke about sin.

After listening to the priest, Gertrud realized she could not be on a ship. Any ship. At least not yet.

“But the one we’re booked on is different,” Leo told her. “Faster than other ocean liners.” Still, he could not persuade her.

“The
Titanic
was supposed to be unsinkable,” she told him. “God slaughters those who challenge him.”

“I understand,” Helene wrote back to her brother. “Maybe you’ll be here in the summer. It’s a better time to be here anyhow because you can swim in the lake and hike up Belknap Mountain with us.” She described to him how much the beach was part of her
daily life in the summer. Instead of walking to the Rhein and changing clothes behind some bushes as she had in Burgdorf, she now could wear a swimsuit beneath a bathrobe, take the elevator down to the lobby and walk out, down the grassy slope and across the sand to the dock. She ended her letter by telling him, “We’ll have a wedding dinner for you in our lobby. …”

She sealed the envelope, returned her stationery and blue ink to her rosewood desk, and walked to the kitchen where Gladys was getting lunch ready for the children. When Tobias darted away from the maid and toward Helene, she dodged him and instantly felt like a bad mother, the most wicked of stepmothers right out of fairy tales. Then, of course, she had to make it up to Tobias, had to read to him, play with him, let him come along to do the laundry in the basement. In the drying room, where the air was so hazy and silver with steam that it would have been easy to lose a pillow case, say, or even a small child, she let Tobias hold the ends of wet sheets as she straightened them and draped them across the heating rods that were hooked up to the boiler.

Though it took twice as long than when she did them alone, she stayed patient; yet, as always, Tobias wanted more, and when Helene finally tried to pry herself away in the elevator and the boy still clung to her with those tiny claws, she felt a sudden rage.
The presence of the biter
. She had not asked Stefan to bring her here, even though it was what she had longed for. But she had
not
asked. And she had come to his children with her best, her very best, had come to them ready to love them. Yet it was only Greta who responded to her with affection. Whatever she did for the boy was not right. Sometimes he wanted more of her. Other times less of her. In any case—never what she was giving him.

He wants his real mother
.

She felt her fury ebb and right away felt sorry for Tobias, who stood next to her in the elevator, mouth twitching, about to cry. “Come here.” She picked him up. Carried him into the apartment. Made cinnamon toast for him. Washed his hands. His face. Sat with him by the kitchen window and promised herself to be even more patient. He pointed up to the fan that was set into a boxy recess in the wall next to the window, and though she had a dozen
other things to do, she let him touch the metal pole with the hook that hung from the fan, helped him to open the top of the little trap door to let air in. She didn’t much like those fans because wasps liked to nest in there, a nuisance Mr. Wilson took care of by cleaning the fans out.

Once she was doing better with Tobias, she’d have children of her own. To balance the two Stefan already had. She knew of other women over thirty who’d had babies. But what if it was her failure with Tobias that kept Stefan from being closer to her? Or maybe it was the other way around. Maybe if Stefan were closer to her, Tobias would be too. Maybe he felt his father’s separateness from her.

As Tobias blew tiny spit bubbles and played with the buttons on her blouse, it occurred to her that if Stefan were to write home about the new stepmother, he’d probably describe her as an unnatural mother, impatient, frightened even. Sara had been a much better stepmother—she knew this from Stefan’s letters, knew how gentle Sara used to be with Greta, how natural. But Sara had only inherited one child—the more likable of the two.

Leo barely mentioned the trip in his reply but wrote instead about the tournament his chess club was organizing for its one-hundred-year anniversary. Twelve other clubs were traveling to Burgdorf, and all trophies would be engraved with the profile of its founder, Karl Tannenschneider. Helene shook her head. Like most of the women in Burgdorf, she had little regard for Herr Tannenschneider, while the men spoke of him with respect because his passion for chess had been so great that he’d forsaken his wife and children.

That Christmas, Helene sent travel presents to Leo and Gertrud: a small alarm clock; two collapsible cups; maps of New York City and New Hampshire; toothbrushes that folded to half their size.

“She just isn’t ready yet,” Leo wrote.

Helene’s frustration with Gertrud left her in no mood to celebrate anyone’s marriage, least of all that of Nate Bloom; but Stefan was curious about the cabaret singer Nate had just married after a two-day courtship. The instant Helene saw Pearl Bloom, she noticed two things about her: that she did not wear a corset like other
women, and that she looked barely twenty—just about half the age of her husband who was telling everyone how he’d seen her in Boston at one of her performances and had invited her to have champagne and smoked salmon with him in his railroad car.

Small and feisty, Pearl Bloom fastened onto Helene as soon as they met, ignoring her other guests. “I was swept away by Nate.” Her voice was deep. Dramatic. “Simply swept away. And by the time I noticed that the train was going, I wouldn’t have stopped it for anything.” Her bobbed hair fell back from her ears. “Hell, you must know how that is.”

Helene had to laugh. “Don’t we all?” She rather liked how that came out, the kind of response a woman far more experienced than she would have thought of.

Pearl looked at her closely. “Besides … it was snowing.”

“What does snow have to do with it?”

Pearl lit a cigarette and held it between her thumb and forefinger as if she were a man. “My shoes—they’re hardly made to walk in snow, Sweetie.”

Helene motioned to Pearl’s high-heeled sling backs. “You were wearing shoes like that?”

“Always.”

“I’d break my neck. My stepdaughter, though—she’d love your shoes. She doesn’t like to wear the ones I order from Germany.”

Pearl contemplated Helene’s feet: black solid leather laced to the ankles; chunky heels. “You are a very independent woman,” she said.

When Pearl arrived in Helene’s life like this—all at once, jostling past her shyness and reserve—Helene knew she was a manifestation of her yearning for a friend to take the place of Margret, who grew fainter with each of her brief, hasty notes. Pearl thought Helene was the most intelligent woman she’d ever known, and she flew at her with confidences and questions, with genuine admiration that astounded Helene who felt huge and slow in comparison. Still, she was so dazzled by Pearl that she dismissed the German custom of developing friendships slowly. Pearl was everything she was not—glamorous, vivacious, vain—and yet, with her she could
talk in a way Stefan would not understand. Both were wives of men who had been married before. Both had been transplanted, leaving everyone they knew behind.

Within a week of meeting Pearl, Helene found herself telling her about all the years she had loved Stefan secretly, and she did not flinch when Pearl counted on her fingers the men she’d slept with before marrying Nate.

“If I hadn’t married Nate, I’d be counting toes by now.”

“Maybe that’s what toes are for.”

Being around Pearl made Helene funny and outrageous. It also made her aware of how she’d been raised to say and do what was proper, and how immensely bored she was with that. And Pearl, she felt dignified when she was with Helene, smart, valued for her thoughts. Men usually had preconceived notions about her, but with Helene she was someone she could have been all along.

Since Pearl had lived on both coasts and had even worked as an entertainer on ocean liners, she found the town of Winnipesaukee confining, but she provided for her own entertainment by giving parties every Saturday evening, some in Nate’s railroad car, others in her music room that she decorated with peach-colored velour drapes and upholstery. Sometimes there’d be dancing. Leaning against the white piano Nate had ordered from New York, she’d sing for her guests in her low, low voice, one shoulder cocked above the other. Often she invited local musicians. Though most of them had not performed in public, she quickly found out who was talented—the old organist from the Lutheran church; the florist’s sister-in-law who played the saxophone; Mr. Bell from the second floor with his violin—and for a few hours she would make them feel famous.

Pearl had no problem understanding Helene’s accent, and she never asked her to repeat what she’d just said. For her, everything that came from Helene was profound. With Pearl here, the house felt different to Helene, fuller. Whenever the two women wanted to reach each other, they’d rap against the heating pipes, a signal that would carry to the other’s apartment:
two raps—come to the window; one rap—open the dumbwaiter
. Helene would lean from her window or into the dumbwaiter to shout down that she was going
for a walk or a swim, and Pearl would yell back that she’d meet her in the lobby. As their voices flickered up and down the dumbwaiter shaft, their echoes trembled into other regions of the building. Typically, Pearl would run out of pepper or butter or onions—never lipstick or shampoo—and if the dumbwaiter was in the basement and the item light enough, she’d span a silk scarf in the opening and catch whatever Helene dropped from above. “I’ll get it back to you,” she’d holler, but she never returned anything, and Helene— who would rather lend than borrow any day—did not remind her.

This woman with her raunchy laugh who cursed so elegantly, who mooched shamelessly but gave generously of herself, was Helene’s only friend in America, and at first Helene worried that their friendship might end as abruptly as it had begun. But gradually she trusted that it would still be there the next day. The next year.

Once the evenings got milder in April, the two women would sit on the flat roof of the
Wasserburg
on folding chairs and talk. A vertigo tug at their stomachs, they’d rest their feet on the low brick wall that ran along the edge of the roof. Since this wall was only two feet high, and the ventilation pipes had pointed tops that could impale a running child, the roof was off-limits to children unless they were with an adult.