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 (122 page)

During Helene’s pregnancy Stefan was cautious with her, formal almost, and she’d find him looking at her as if bracing himself for her death.
I’ll be here
, she reminded herself. Nights when he had trouble sleeping he’d watch her sleep. Whenever she rolled over, she’d automatically reach for her hair in back of her neck and—without waking herself—hold it in one hand until she’d settle herself back on the pillow.

Other nights it was Helene who would lie next to him long after he was asleep. She would hear his children’s breathing like a heartbeat, waiting, tugging at her, invoking their mothers who had died giving birth, and felt a slow dread in her limbs. More than ever before she thought about Elizabeth and Sara. If she saw Miss Garland by the mailboxes or in the drying room, she kept her talking, hoping she’d start reminiscing about Stefan’s first two wives. After all, Miss Garland had been a grown woman when Elizabeth and Sara were born: she’d seen them at mass every week; had watched them get married; had gone to their funerals.

Very quickly, Miss Garland grasped how she could befriend the third Mrs. Blau. Wishing she had observed Elizabeth and Sara closer, she sieved her memories, but what she recalled couldn’t fill more than a few conversations. And so it was only natural to speculate: that woman by the lake with the red hat and the braid—she could have been Sara … quite likely had been Sara the first summer of her marriage to Stefan Blau. From there a tale would ripen about the summer Sara Blau had ordered that outrageous red hat from Concord. Images of Miss Garland’s childhood would blend with glimpses she’d had of Elizabeth and Sara as girls: that infection
in her leg from a dog bite now became Sara’s; the teacher who’d ridiculed Miss Garland for not reading faster was reprimanded by Elizabeth’s father; Miss Garland’s yearning for friends was transformed into a large birthday celebration on Sara’s fifth birthday … so that, gradually, Helene was left with an impression of her two predecessors that felt oddly out of focus as if they had lived decades before their time.

She tried not to worry when Leo wrote that Gertrud was pregnant too. He sounded so hopeful: “She is calmer now. Happier.” His leg was healing. Slowly. “But at least I’ll be able to walk without crutches once the baby is here. Otherwise it would be difficult to carry it.” Their letters kept crossing, filled with anticipation of the babies—Gertrud’s to be born in July, Helene’s a month later—and with renewed plans for a visit. “Once the war is over.”

Once the war is over
…

Quite a few of their letters ended that way.

Already, she could picture the infants side by side, strong-jawed and fair-skinned, with the long legs and high span of forehead from the Montag side of their families. When she felt the first hesitant movements within her, she wanted to believe that—despite Stefan’s resistance—the child would deepen her union with him. Everything around her pleased her: the echo of the tenants’ voices in the lobby; the taste of maple syrup poured on snow; the scent of fresh pillowcases as she settled into sleep.

Maternity corsets were a discovery: they made it easier to breathe than regular corsets since they were only lightly boned. Letting out their stretchable lacers in front and back, Helene wore them as loosely as she could, just enough to define her, not hold her in. She bought yards of gray broadcloth, blue silk, white linen. Chose collars of batiste and lace. Hired Mrs. Teichman to come to the apartment twice a week, not just Wednesday but also on Friday, which was Pearl’s regular day with the seamstress, to sew dresses with adjustable waists and longer belts, skirts with extra pleats held in place by snaps that Helene would gradually undo as the pregnancy progressed.

Evenings, when the bedsheet that Mrs. Teichman had spread on
the floor was cluttered with scraps and pins, she’d scoop it up, tie the ends together, and carry it away. It would always mystify Tobias how, when Mrs. Teichman returned, that same sheet would be folded inside her flowered suitcase—small and tidy—as if it had shaken itself out while she slept. He liked the seamstress, not only because his family got to eat in the kitchen while she scattered patterns and fabrics and scissors and buttons all over the dining room, but also because meals were special on days she was there. Since she was in demand and enjoyed gossip as well as food, some of her customers in the
Wasserburg
competed with each other, courting her by offering her the best, hoping she’d tell their neighbors how well she’d been treated. It was known that Mrs. Evans served expensive food but only in small portions. And that Mrs. Clarke fed the seamstress’ leftovers to her husband the following day.

What Tobias liked most about the seamstress was that she raised flesh-eating plants. But his stepmother didn’t share his fascination for Mrs. Teichman’s stories of feeding spiders and flies to her plants, and she got upset when the seamstress gave Tobias two of her plants. They were much smaller than both Helene and Tobias had imagined them, and it was their harmless size—rather than his insistence—that persuaded her to let him keep them.

Late one morning, while Helene was stirring a few grains of sugar and half a cup of white wine into the sour-sweet gravy for
Sauerbraten
, a dull ache pulled at her insides as if they’d suddenly liquified and were about to pour from her. With a cry, she sank to her knees, already grieving the loss of her child. Cold sweat slicked her back, her breasts. She shivered as darkness spun through her, around her. Held herself hard with her arms around her massive belly. And lived a lifetime of being a childless woman,
the four of them around the table … she and Stefan with Greta and Tobias … then the children growing… leaving her to stand next to Stefan at their weddings, a barren woman, useless to Stefan because the children he married her for no longer need her
. As darkness and pain coursed through her, she feared she didn’t deserve a child because she hadn’t loved the children of the dead mothers
enough; and from that fear rose a sudden and vicious envy of Gertrud who would have a child despite her craziness.
No. I’d be the better mother. More stable and loving
. And it was then that she offered Gertrud’s child up for hers—
take hers but let mine live
—an offering that came at her out of the darkness and thrust her from that darkness back into her kitchen where Greta crouched next to her on the floor, small face pressed against Helene’s belly; and as Helene felt her stepdaughter’s murmur pass through her flesh, the child within her solidified once more, took shape, and murmured back to Greta. Years later, when Helene would see the two children play together, she’d sometimes be reminded of the first moment they’d been linked like this, with her on the black-and-white tiled floor, a dusting of flour on her apron from the dumplings, enveloped by the sour yet sweet scent of the roast.

“What are we doing on the floor?” Trying to smile at Greta and feeling her lips tremble in that effort, she raised herself, one hand on her belly, which felt firm now.

Though she would not forget the pain, she would forget its severity until two months later when she’d be taken with a sequence of those very same spasms, leaving her chilled and sweaty—that too was familiar; that too—on the hottest day of July, no wind at all, the lake sullen beneath the blinding sky; and when Dr. Miles was called to the house—a month early for the baby to arrive—the people of Winnipesaukee lit candles for the third wife of Stefan Blau who, as she pushed her child into the world, suddenly wanted to hold back, keep it sheltered because she was terrified it would not be welcomed. Not by its father. Not by this country.

But the doctor’s palms pressed down on her belly. “Don’t stop now.”

She set her teeth.

“You have to keep pushing, Mrs. Blau.”

She had felt the townspeople’s distrust ever since May when a German submarine had sunk the
Lusitania
, killing more than a thousand people. Stefan said she was too sensitive, but she could feel it like a shift in temperature. That sudden tightness in faces when she entered a store. Even in church. Maybe because to the
townspeople she seemed more German than her husband, a more recent arrival with a stronger accent than his.

“Mrs. Blau? Do you hear me?”

Her child would never be as American as the children of Stefan’s American wives who linked him to this town. Still, by birth her child would be American. A different nationality than hers. No—

“You must push.”

For her child … for her child she would do it, become American. As soon as she could.

“Push. Now—”

Then, as all sky pressed down on the lake and squeezed the sun aside, squeezed it through the lace curtains Mrs. Teichman had sewn, squeezed it so hard that the sun turned transparent, Helene could no longer keep from bearing down, and he burst from her, the child, a boy, and as she touched him, cautiously at first and then ripping him into her arms, it was with the certainty that she and her son were alone in an inhospitable country.

Stefan came to her bed.

Bent to kiss her forehead.

Asked to hold the child.

“The child you didn’t want?”

“Lenchen … don’t say that.”

“It’s the truth.” Without blinking, she looked at this man who had put her name on the deeds for his house and restaurant to force the heavens to keep her alive, to pacify her for not having a child.
Tokens of his belief Trades I never wanted
. But she had her child now. Had it all—child and house and restaurant.

He reached for her son, and she let him. Watched him hold her son—awkward about it, so awkward—and found him useless. It was as though all the men of all her fantasies had fathered this child, had given her the brazenness to seize her husband, use him to get this child who was hers alone, thrust into life through her will.

The same month Helene gave birth to Robert, Leo became the father of a girl, Trudi. When he sent a photo of Trudi with a letter that both she and Gertrud were doing well, the little girl’s features
looked so much like Robert’s that they could have been twins.

“Except that her head seems a bit larger,” Helene told Stefan.

He studied the picture. “Probably because of how the light fell when she was photographed in her cradle,” he suggested.

“If we didn’t have a child the same age, we wouldn’t notice the difference.”

To his father, Robert was merely one more child in the family, while Helene felt a bond to her son that stunned her, a bond that—in comparison—made marriage seem weak, her relationship with her brother insignificant. Robert absorbed her thoughts, her hours. Though she continued to take the best care of Stefan’s American children, it was her son’s quiet laugh that enchanted her, the tug of his hunger that filled her with awe as he drew his nourishment from her, his gaze focused on her. Only her.

After years of longing for Stefan, it amazed her to have her forceful love returned to her in every blink of her son’s eyes, every movement. As her tenderness and passion shifted and settled on her son, Stefan felt no longer burdened by her unspoken love, and the marriage found a new symmetry in respect and shared accomplishments.

Her son was so much easier to raise than Tobias: content where Tobias had been fretful; affectionate where Tobias had been rigid.