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 (128 page)

He hesitated before he nodded. Mrs. Wilson always scowled at him when he delivered those flyers. Captain, she called Miss Garland, Miss Captain, and some of the tenants had picked up on that name.

“The role of a messenger has always been one of great value. And responsibility.” Miss Garland walked to her desk where a typewriter with silver-rimmed keys stood among boxes of stationery and carbon paper. There, she always composed her long lists, titled:
Helpful Suggestions from Miss Garland, President, Tenants’ Society
. When she had first approached Helene Blau with the suggestion of forming a tenants’ society—“A little community,” she’d said, “where people will get together at each other’s apartments once a week for dinner or a slice of cake”—Helene had told her she was too busy, but she had come to regret that she hadn’t discouraged Miss Garland from the idea.

Although the tenants’ society collapsed after one meeting at Miss Garland’s apartment where only six people appeared and left early, mumbling excuses when she asked who would like to host the next gathering, Miss Garland kept writing new lists. Living in the
Wasserburg
was the best thing she had ever made happen for herself, and she was so devoted to the house that she thought about it constantly and annoyed nearly everyone who lived there with her ideas to make it better yet. She didn’t mind the work of typing everything six times, one original and five carbons, making a total of thirty-six flyers that she’d either leave in people’s mailboxes or send with Robert who’d deliver them door to door. In addition to these flyers, she posted hand-printed reminders in the appropriate places that Mrs. Wilson
took down with decreasing patience:
Please, close door of incinerator room! Please, shake your umbrellas before bringing them into the building! Please, don’t leave laundry in the drying room longer than necessary because others want to use the rods too! Please, don’t drag sand into the lobby from the beach!

The only tenant who valued her notes was Yates Hedge, a widowed geologist who’d recently moved into the apartment next to her with his forty-year-old son, Buddy, an accountant who’d never married. Since Buddy was sensitive to bright sun, he worked nights in the office of the Winnipesaukee School.

“Without you,” Yates Hedge liked to tell Miss Garland, “we wouldn’t know half of what’s happening.”

When Robert knocked at the Hedges’ door, Buddy led him into the living room where all windows were boarded up to keep the light out. The only picture in the apartment was of his mother, a huge oil portrait that hung in one of the shut windows and showed Mrs. Hedge in a gravy-colored suit and matching hat.

“May I please look at your Christmas closet?” Robert asked.

Buddy rubbed the top of his bald head. “Oh, sure …” He shrugged. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” He headed for the coat closet to pull out the decorated Christmas tree that he took out every December or whenever one of the children in the building asked to see it. Like this boy who asked for it at least once a month. Or the Braddock girl who liked to sit on the floor next to it, all quiet with that loopy smile of hers.

Reverently, Robert touched the stiff silver branches, the glossy red balls, the strands of tinsel. Accustomed to his
Mutti
taking an entire day to decorate the family’s Christmas tree with ornaments and real candles that she never lit because their father wouldn’t permit it—
too dangerous; fire can kill
—he was fascinated by a tree that was ready any day of the year.

“Visit is over,” Buddy said. “Make sure to tell Miss Garland thank you from us.”

But Mrs. Wilson did not say thank you when Robert arrived with peanut breath and yet another dispatch from the tenants’ society. “So involved with such trivia,” she muttered. As usual, she
tossed Miss Garland’s latest ideas into the trash can. “Acts like she’s the self-appointed captain of the building.”

“You know why Miss Captain mixes into everyone’s business?” Mr. Wilson asked Robert, and when the boy shook his head, Mr. Wilson leaned down and whispered, “It’s because she never had sex.”

“What are you telling that boy, Homer?”

“That she’s one lonely old broad.” He winked at Robert and scratched the long creases on his forehead.

Though Robert didn’t know what having sex meant, he suspected from Mr. Wilson’s tone that
not
having sex had to be one of the worst things that could happen to anyone.

“There’s work to be done, Homer,” Mrs. Wilson said. “Danny needs help in the garage.”

“On my way.” Homer Wilson shuffled off. Ever since the adoption party, his wife had seemed lost without that goal of making Danny her son, and she looked disappointed when she spoke of him. She’d also been getting upset at Homer for taking Danny to the dog track and for complaining about how cold it was in New Hampshire. Homer wished he still lived in Florida. Alone. He’d been saving some. Not a lot. But a few dollars now and then that he kept in an old tire beneath the workbench in the garage. Where he was heading now.

While his wife’s voice followed him. “Also … the Braddocks’ sink is stopped up again, and—”

He didn’t turn. “I’ve been on my way for the last twenty years,” he said, thinking about Florida.

As Helene’s adopted language wove itself into her dreams, it became easier to speak it. At times she even found herself thinking in English; it eliminated that slow process of translating everything inside her head before she spoke, and it gave her more confidence to express herself. Gradually she began to recognize American accents. Tourists from Boston spoke differently than tourists from New York; and her husband, who had sounded so American to her when she’d arrived, definitely had a German accent that set him apart from the people of Winnipesaukee.

But what set Stefan even more apart—not just him but his entire
family—was the fact that he came from the country America had been at war with; and now that the war was over and several young men from Winnipesaukee lay buried overseas, he could feel that separateness even more than during the years of war. Coming to America had been so easy, like arriving in a place that had already been in his blood, his real home that freed him to become who he was, a home with a far stronger hold on him than his first home. But now it felt as though he were starting all over again in territory more foreign than any he knew, living among people who resented him—not because of anything he had done, but because forty years ago he’d been born in Germany.

It made him draw closer to his family, limit his time with Americans.

On the tenth anniversary of his wedding to Helene, he prepared a veal roast with raspberry sauce for his family, and when they sat down at the dinner table, he presented Helene with an emerald necklace. She tried to fasten it around her neck, but the clasp was too complicated. As he stood up to secure it for her, he suddenly wanted to kiss the curve of her strong neck, but since he figured it would embarrass her in front of the children, he only touched her shoulders before he returned to his seat. On the roof directly above them, the claws of the squirrels were like harsh whispers.

Helene looked at the American children eating, their small hands maneuvering the silverware with the graceful German table manners she’d taught them, and her throat constricted with a startling rage as if the necklace had shrunk: these children had hindered her chance of having a normal marriage with Stefan, a marriage in which their father wouldn’t fear giving her his seed and his devotion, a marriage in which all children were his and hers. As she brought her fingers between her skin and the necklace, she found enough space, and yet the tightness remained. From across the table she felt Greta’s calm gaze as if she knew and—even more so—understood and pitied her, and in that moment Helene resolved to herself that she would never permit herself that rage again.

But it was as if something unfinished had settled itself between her and Greta, who was touchy and rebellious while getting
dressed the next morning, complaining about the shoes that Helene was finally able to order from Germany again.

“They’re clunky,” she wailed.

“They’re first-rate quality.”

“But they look third rate.”

Third rate. Third wife
. She didn’t let Greta see how much those words cut. Patiently she told her that she had to wear the shoes because they gave good support to her arches. “It’s important during those years when your feet are growing.”

“I don’t care about my arches.”

“But I care about them.”

“They are my arches.” Greta stalked off to her room.

She can certainly be dramatic, Helene thought. Usually it was easier than this to be around Greta, even if the girl often fussed too much around her, trying to help with chores or watching her as if concerned she might be lonely. To distract her, Helene would ask her to play with Robert, who liked to follow Greta around though she was nearly nine years older than he. They’d read stories together or swim in the lake, diving and leaping from the dock, Robert more nimble in water than on land.

When Helene would go into the water with them, she’d float on a rubber raft while Robert and Greta would bob around her, pulling her this way and that as if competing for her. Afterwards she’d sit on the dock, watching those two play ball or dig channels from the water to the sand, making it flow into the moats that surrounded their sand castles.

But Tobias usually kept to himself. Helene wished he had something he was good at, the way Robert was at the piano, but all Tobias did was build tiny animals from matches, and he didn’t like it when she asked if she could touch them. He was secretive, that boy, when it came to what he loved. Noisy when it came to what he didn’t like.

Sometimes though he’d let Greta coax him into running with her and Robert through the house, visiting tenants. One Sunday in October, when it was too wet and cold to be outdoors, the three of
them rode the elevator up and down. When they knocked at the Hedges’ door and Buddy Hedge opened it, they asked at the same moment—just as they’d practiced—if they could look at his Christmas closet.

Next they tried to visit Mr. Bell who wouldn’t let them in because he didn’t want their father to find out that he was still cooking on his hot plate. Since it was cheaper than using a stove, he’d set up the hot plate in his bedroom. By now, he’d moved entirely into his bedroom and only used the kitchen counters to store his old law books.

After Mrs. Clarke gave the Blau children bread with butter and sugar, they ran down the stairs to the cellar and into the long room, where all the tenants had storage bins that were divided by wooden slats and secured with padlocks. When Tobias stuck his arms through those slats, Greta and Robert helped him move the tenants’ belongings around in the hope that it would confuse them. Then they rummaged through the wooden trunks that their father had pushed against the back wall of their family’s storage bin and hauled armfuls of clothes to the sixth floor.

By the full-length mirror on their parents’ closet door, they tried on hats that sank to their noses and garments that pooled around their feet: the deep-green loden coat that Helene had bought after her wedding, a velvet jacket with piping that had belonged to Elizabeth, the shiny black pants Stefan had worn the day he’d arrived in New York, a blue skirt Sara had sewn for herself, the lace blouse Helene had worn when she was pregnant.

Beneath the light of the wall sconces, Stefan Blau’s children pranced in his outdated suits and the clothes of his wives. Generous in sharing and trading, they laughed and screamed with delight, sounds that would not reach other apartments because the walls their father had built were far too thick to allow for noise or fire to pass through. When Stefan stopped by before the evening rush in his restaurant and came upon Tobias in the Persian lamb coat that used to belong to Elizabeth, Robert in a tweed jacket that Sara had worn on their walks, and Greta in a brocade dress that Helene had bought for one of Pearl’s parties, he was drawn into a moment of
utter disorientation and could no longer sort out which woman had given birth to which child, implying a terrible oversight on his part, and in this fusing of images—wives buried and children born and wives married—the Hungarian came to him once again, one more person he had not been able to keep alive, and he heard the Hungarian’s voice along with the voices of the other men in the kitchen and the voices of his mother and of his children, all in different languages until he no longer knew which was his own language.