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 (125 page)

“Embarrassing,” Mr. Clarke said to his wife, but they were both too curious to decline the invitation.

“I’ll sing if you want me to,” Pearl Bloom offered the Wilsons.

To Helene it felt odd to be celebrating the adoption of a grown man when her brother had just lost his infant son.

The afternoon of the party, it occurred to her that Mrs. Evans looked healthier than usual, and when she commented on it, Mrs. Evans admitted, “I’ve just come back from an appointment with Dr. Miles. I always wear makeup when I go to the doctor. So he will take one glance at me and tell me there’s nothing wrong with me.”

“You’re not fooling him.” Her husband turned to Mr. Braddock. “Arthritis. She has arthritis and she pretends she has no troubles.”

“Stop fussing, Henry.”

“Someone has to fuss over you.”

“Henry doesn’t trust doctors who’re younger than he is,” she explained to Mr. Braddock.

Miss Garland pulled Helene aside. “A tragedy. It’s a tragedy. Now that Mrs. Wilson finally gets Danny, he’s too old to need a mother.”

Irene Wilson was dashing about, serving and cleaning all at once with her customary urgency to get things done the instant she became aware of them—a curse and a blessing, she’d once confessed to Helene—and though she would eventually get everything finished, she’d feel overwhelmed because she couldn’t do it all at once. It left her forever
dissatisfied with what she accomplished, impatient with her husband who couldn’t do anything quickly enough for her.

“Let me see if she needs help,” Helene said.

“I just remembered something about Sara Blau,” Miss Garland started, trying to entice Helene to stay with her, but she excused herself and headed toward Mrs. Wilson. Miss Garland shook her head. Ever since Robert had been born, the third Mrs. Blau had not been very curious about her husband’s first two wives.

A few steps from her a group of tenants was asking the old lawyer about the adoption, and Miss Garland joined them.

“Yes, but do you think it’s legal?” Nate Bloom was asking.

“That’s what I want to know,” Mrs. Clarke said.

“I checked it out before I drew up their adoption papers,” Mr. Bell told them.

“I bet that makes him the oldest person ever to be adopted,” Miss Garland speculated.

“I found a case of a thirty-four-year-old woman in Oregon.”

“Let me guess,” Pearl Bloom said. “Adopted by a thirty-five-year-old man.”

Her husband raised his eyebrows at her. Usually a comment like that would make him laugh, but he was angry at her for dropping his old soap slivers down the incinerator chute. She shrugged. Walked toward the tables.

“No, a lady adopted her,” she could hear Mr. Bell explain. “Not even a relative. A neighbor lady.”

Pearl sat down next to Mrs. Braddock and Fanny. “How are you, Sweetie?” she asked the girl.

“Sweetie …,” Fanny laughed, milk dribbling from her mouth. “Sweetie sweetie sweetie—”

“That’s enough now.” Her mother wiped Fanny’s chin.

“Sweetie swee—”

“Sshhh …,” Pearl whispered softly. “Sshhh … my pretty girl.”

“You’re her favorite,” Mrs. Braddock said.

“I need to be someone’s favorite today.” Pearl glanced toward Nate who was standing with his back to her. Ever since she’d married him, she’d been after him to stop saving those worn bits of soap that he kept in a jar by the bathroom sink.

As soon as the Wilsons’ adoption party was over, Nate followed her to the elevator and started back at her again. “You had no right, no right at all to throw something of mine out.”

“That old soap looked like bones, and it smelled like—”

“If it bothers your nose that much, you should keep your nose out of it.”

“Can we wait till we get inside our apartment?”

He rode with her in silence, unlocked their door.

“Look around you.” She motioned to their furniture. “Everything we have is of good quality … but those pieces of soap were disgusting.”

“They were mine.”

“I’ll go and buy you a hundred pieces of new soap.”

“I don’t want new soap. I want my old soap back.”

“Well, it’s too late. And I can’t believe that with all your generosity and your money you—”

“That’s why I have money.”

“Because of that dirty old soap?”

“Because I save little things.”

“Please.” She took off one shoe, gave three quick raps to the pipes that led up to the Blaus’ apartment, and half an hour later met Helene at the locked door that blocked off the stairs to the roof.

“I got Birdie to stay with the children for a while,” she said.

Both in warm jackets and hats, they unfolded their canvas chairs and settled in them as they had many other evenings. Only a thin border of sun was left on the upper parts of the mountains, while the lower slopes already looked dark.

“That man. He spends tons on entertaining but thinks I’m wasteful for throwing out his soap.”

Helene opened a thermos of hot, sweet tea and poured it into two cups. “Here.” She passed one to Pearl.

“Thanks. You know what he called me? Irresponsible. You want to know what I call irresponsible? Having a son and not telling anyone.”

“Nate with a son?”

“I’ve only known a few weeks, and he asked me not to mention it to anyone, but hell… keeping secrets takes effort, and I’m in no
mood to make one single effort for that man. The kid’s name is Ira.”

“How old—”

“Well, he isn’t really a kid anymore. He’s in high school already, lives with his mother in Boston. When I asked Nate why he hadn’t told me about his son before, he said he just doesn’t think about him very often. It makes me furious that he would be so indifferent toward his son. Doesn’t visit him more than once or twice a year.” She looked up at the clouds, gray and streaked, thinning out where they touched the tips of the mountains in wispy smears.

As dusk enveloped them, they talked about Nate and his son. About how different Helene’s brother was with his child.

“Yes, but he’s doing too much,” Helene said, “feeding and cleaning Trudi as well as his wife … running the pay-library. Always the one to be giving.”

“Isn’t that the way in every marriage?”

“I hope not.”

“Maybe as long as the giver doesn’t mind.”

“I wish I could visit Leo. Help if I can.”

“Then go.”

“Stefan wouldn’t leave the restaurant for that long. Especially now.”

“Then go without him. Just take Robert.”

“But Greta and Tobias—”

“Can stay with me. Maybe some of the time with their grandparents. You’ve never had any time all alone with your son.”

“I haven’t.”

“Just take him with you.”

Here on the roof, both women often made decisions as each heard herself talk to her friend and, listening to her own words, found out what she wanted. With Pearl, Helene had come to expect that their conversations would go right to where things mattered, that she would feel upheld—in big and small matters alike—and that she was capable of doing the same for Pearl. With Stefan there was usually more kept back than revealed.

“Mein Lenchen,”
he liked to call her when he saw her attending to the children.
“Mein Lenchen.”
Other than that, his rare words
of tenderness were for his children. He would have felt stunned had he guessed at the accumulation of loving words Helene had held back over the years. Anyone listening to him and Helene talk about their days would have assumed a partnership rather than marriage because their duties were so clearly divided: while he operated the restaurant and supervised repairs, she took care of the children and the apartment. A woman of strong and few attachments, she’d come to know her limitations—that she could only love very few people and then with an intensity that kept her breath high and shallow in her throat. Robert was one of those few. So was Pearl. Stefan had been once, but her love had lived for too long in a place where it hadn’t been nourished, and she’d survived by becoming immune to that passion until it had faded.

As she tried to explain this to Pearl, her friend smiled. “Passion,” she murmured, “can be restored.”

Helene leaned back in her chair and smiled, suddenly feeling glamorous. It sometimes was like that when she was with Pearl, talking with such ease, and she would take that image with her and, for hours afterwards, feel glamorous and confident. “And how do you know so much?” she asked.

“I just know about people.” Pearl got up to sit on the brick ledge.

“I get vertigo just looking at you,” Helene protested. Extending one hand, she pulled Pearl back.

“I see you and Stefan …,” Pearl said, “and it is still there.”

A few months after Horst’s death, Gertrud died in the sanatorium. When Helene tried to make travel arrangements to be with Leo and Trudi, she found that quite a few ocean liners had either been confiscated or were not ready for passage so soon after the war, and it wasn’t until September that she was able to book a cabin for Robert and herself on a freighter.

Though she felt selfish not taking the other children, Stefan urged her to leave them with Pearl. “It’ll be more affordable … and I’ll see them every day.”

Robert hadn’t known the earth was big enough for anyone to travel this long. From the German coast, he and his mother took
trains to Burgdorf, and the closer they got, the more excited she became despite her sadness, pointing through the rain-streaked windows to show him the country where she’d grown up. It warmed her to hear familiar sounds, to be surrounded by the language she’d grown up with.

Although Leo had written to her about his knee injury, she was startled to see him limp toward her from the pay-library as if the loss of his wife and son had manifested themselves in his movements. He’d always been thin, but now he was gaunt. Unhealthy. It seemed that he had to remind himself to smile. Except when he played with his daughter. Then he was joyful, patient. It moved Helene to see her brother in the role of father, the kind of father she wished Stefan could be.

She had felt afraid of meeting Trudi, afraid of feeling repulsed, yet all that vanished the instant she held the little girl who, indeed, was hard to look at. When Trudi brought her short arms around Helene’s neck and kissed her on the cheek, Helene felt choked with love and guilt at having sacrificed her for Robert. Still, it was better to have both children alive than to have lost Robert—even if it meant that Trudi would not grow like others.

Except for her large head and short limbs, she looked a lot like Robert, and that’s what the children seemed to think too because over the five weeks of the visit they kept going to the mirror, strong chins forward as they faced their images. Sometimes they’d laugh, Robert’s laugh slow but lasting, Trudi’s sudden and high. Until she’d remember about her mother and grow solemn.

One afternoon, when he stood with his fingers linked behind his back, Trudi tried to copy that posture, but her arms wouldn’t go that far. She stamped her feet, furious that she couldn’t do something that simple.

Robert was watching her in the mirror when her eyes trapped him there.

“You do it.” She turned. Stuck her left arm back toward him. “Hold this.”

He grasped her square little hand while she swung her other arm back.

“Put them together now.”

He tried. But her fingers barely reached beyond her torso.

She craned her neck to check in the mirror what was happening behind her. “Make them touch,” she ordered.

Afraid of hurting her, he tugged at her hands.

“Now? Are they touching now?” He shook his head.

“Make them.” She curved her chest forward, threw her shoulders back. “Now?”

“Not yet.”

“Now?”

He hesitated. And then he lied for the first time in his life. “Yes.”

She let out a long breath. Snatched her hands from his. Cupped them against her chest to stop the hurting in her fingers and shoulders. “Tomorrow I’ll do it
allein
—alone.”

He followed her into the living room where she hoisted herself onto the piano bench and, standing, jabbed at the keys, making horrid noises.

“Sshhh.” Robert climbed next to her.

“Let me. I have a piano teacher.”

“I want a piano teacher.”

“He’s in America. His name is Mr. Howard.” Robert waited for her to stop before he raised himself on his knees and played for her.

When Helene came in and stood behind the children, they didn’t notice her.

“I have a brother,” Trudi was telling Robert. “He is in a box.”

“I have a brother. A sister too.”

“Are they in a box?”

“No, in America.”

“My
Mutti
went to the box. To fetch my brother. She’ll come back. When I’m tall. And won’t steal sugar.”

All at once Helene was angry at Gertrud for dying and leaving her child with such confusion. To distract her, she said, “Look at that, Trudi,” and picked up a clay pot with the curled, brown remnants of a fern. “All dried out. Shall we give it some water?”

Trudi slid from the bench while Robert kept playing.

“Any other plants? You can show me.”

With a tin milk can full of water, she followed Trudi as the girl
pointed out flowerpots, most of them dry. Trudi’s legs couldn’t move as fast as her energy was propelling her forward, and Helene felt a deep pity for the little body in struggle with itself. When Trudi opened the door to her father’s bedroom, Helene froze. Photos of the dead Gertrud hung on the walls—everything in white: the candles and flowers and pale dead skin. Quickly she placed herself between Trudi and the photos.