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 (135 page)

In the meantime, though, he was left with his own copy of the loan document. If he ripped it up and dropped it down the incinerator chute, it might end up with Homer Wilson. Flushing it down the toilet could result in plumbing problems. Late one night, when he got ready to burn it in his restaurant, he heard the Hungarian’s voice—
nothing good can come from fire
—but still he set his match to the paper, though his fingers were shaking—
nothing good nothing good nothing good from fire
—and as he felt his rage rise with
the flames, he felt justified because of Lelia’s betrayal. But the Hungarian was not about to be silent.
When did you really begin to treat the Flynns’ money as your own?

In January, Greta moved into a small apartment on the first floor. It troubled Stefan that she was choosing to live away from him, but Helene pointed out to him that many young women of Greta’s age went to universities, farther away from their families than a different floor in the same building. Still, Greta was his only child who’d often made him feel like a worthy father, and by leaving, she was shaking that image he would have liked to have of himself. He never knew what to say to his sons. With Tobias—either sullen or quick to cut him with clever words—even small incidents, like reprimanding him for passing notes in class, caused injured silences. And the other boy was so cautious. Spoiled soft by his mother. Almost ten but young for his age. Except when he played the piano.

The first reported healing happened by chance.

Miss Perkins, the teacher who used to live next door to the Blaus and whose hands had been deformed with arthritis for nearly ten years now, dropped her umbrella outside Heflins’, and Greta—on her way to mail a letter to Father Creed—bent to pick it up. Though Greta only touched the teacher’s hands for an instant, Miss Perkins felt a warmth throughout her fingers and palms, a warmth that stayed with her and made it possible to uncurl her fingers that evening. By morning the stiffness had seeped from her hands as though Greta had released something within her, and within a week her fingers were restored to the agility they’d had when she was in her forties and used to plant flowers at the first hint of spring in her garden by the lake, shoulders warmed by the sun while her knees burrowed into the earth, dislodging the last skin of winter.

After tales of her recovery spun through town, people recalled other incidents they’d mistaken for coincidences—Mr. Small’s headache disappearing moments after Greta Blau had brushed against his arm in the library; that pain in Betty Simms’ knee easing up when Greta Blau had helped her up the church steps; a wart vanishing from the right thumb of Mrs. Teichman after she’d sewn
a winter coat for Greta Blau. While Stefan was skeptical, Helene believed in Greta’s uncommon talent for healing. Every time she looked at Robert, she knew that—without Greta—her son would have bled from her that long-ago morning.

The people of Winnipesaukee took to coming to the
Wasserburg
at all hours to wait outside Greta’s apartment, and Stefan would find them leaning against the carved railing that led up from his lobby or sitting on the mahogany chairs. When he protested to everyone in the family, except Greta, that his lobby looked like a doctor’s waiting room, Helene suggested he simply talk to Greta. But he found it impossible to question his daughter on anything.
Because of the loan. Even though I did what’s right. For everyone
.

Though Greta did not encourage the townspeople, she didn’t turn them away when they appeared at the
Wasserburg
. That gift of touching—she had known since childhood that it passed through her to others, but she’d used it rarely and without thinking about it much. And until now she’d never been asked to reach for someone in pain.

Sight-seers, Mr. Wilson called the people because, while they waited to meet with Greta, they stared at the light-filled lobby with its rich paneling, the marble tiles and the peacock carpets that were still lush and colorful. Most had only seen the house from the outside, and they’d come to love it—or rather an image of it that was shaped by their own dreams of opulence and by what others had told them about the house. They were more absorbed with what happened in the
Wasserburg
than in their neighborhoods, and when they entered the vestibule and stepped through the French doors, they gazed up at the crescents of multicolored glass that signified their passage into a place unlike any they’d known before.

While Miss Garland complained, “Most of them couldn’t afford an apartment here,” Mr. Wilson soon became accustomed to chatting with them, snatching minutes of gossip while acting busy in case his wife were to see him and remind him of his unfinished chores.

And so they continued to come and sit outside Greta’s door, the people of Winnipesaukee, tearing through her reluctance with the power of their belief in her abilities. Yet, when she called them into
her living room, they felt disappointed because it was so plain: wooden floors without a carpet, books stacked against the walls, a table with neither lace nor linen, narrow chairs without pillows. Puzzled why she didn’t make her apartment as splendid as the rest of her father’s house, they speculated what they would do if they inherited three million dollars. Certainly not stay in one place like Greta who hadn’t even gone away to college, who’d chosen the only apartment in the building that was as small as Miss Garland’s. It mystified them why she would spend most of her hours by herself, the banker’s red-haired granddaughter, the one they had to convince to tap into her gift, a gift she would have sheltered in the silence of her rooms if the town hadn’t pressed her into dispersing it as though extracting dues.

This gift had nothing to do with the house and, yet, made up for the house in an odd way as if she were reinstating something her father had taken from the town, though no one could have said precisely what it was, because the
Wasserburg
had become the finest accomplishment the town could pride itself on. It had stood here on the shore of the great lake that the Indians had named Smile of the Great Spirit, had stood here long enough for many people to find it difficult to remember what their town had been like before it was built, while for the children it had always been part of their lives.

With tumors and arthritis the townspeople came to Greta.

With headaches and broken bones.

Some brought their bad dreams.

Their secret fears.

And she’d feel the suffering that belonged to their bodies, now and again even their deaths, though she never told them. That knowledge came to her in pictures—some bright and sudden, most gradually as if strained through a screen of dust. They wanted her to touch them, and she didn’t mind doing that, touch them, lightly, on the shoulder, say, or on the knee or forehead, and after they’d leave, they’d report to others a tingling that expanded to heat their entire bodies and made them capable of doing what they hadn’t done before. Like the Heflins’ little daughter, Betty, ill with polio since she was one year old, who’d never walked till Greta ran her
fingers along the thin, pale legs; and even though Betty would never walk quite right, she’d manage to propel herself forward from one foot to the other, refining that movement into an oddly elegant limp by the time she’d go away to teacher’s college.

When Greta was alone, she often drew in her sketchbooks, drew in fast and fluid lines the way she had as a child when premonitions had appeared in the pictures she’d drawn on the butcher paper Sara had given her, showing her things she didn’t know yet. Sometimes she felt depleted by the hopes of the people who came to her.

“What I want for myself,” she wrote to the young priest, “is to learn how to touch without fusing, without bleeding away.”

When Noah Creed replied, he suggested she make a list of what she liked. “And then provide those things for yourself.”

Oranges.

Solitude.

Trousers instead of skirts.

Chocolate.

Books.

Walks along the lake.

Being with my family—though not as much as being alone.

Noah Creed.

She sent him her list except for the last item on it. She’d never missed anyone before, but Noah Creed had been walking through her dreams since that afternoon she’d rowed him out on the lake.
Much easier to provide chocolate for myself
. Still, his suggestion to provide for herself what she liked gave her the idea to volunteer for errands her family or even the tenants had in Boston. She would take the train and stay at the Blanchard Hotel in a room overlooking the Charles River. And if she had no reason to travel there, she would invent one, because to admit to a two-hundred-mile round trip just to meet Father Creed for dinner would have been risky because he would have felt forced to stop seeing her.

She brought back a set of French pans for her father’s restaurant.

Silk roses for Pearl Bloom.

A blue terrycloth robe for her stepmother.

Sunglasses for Buddy Hedge.

Silk dresses and high-heeled shoes for herself as if visiting a priest
required a different sort of attire than the loose, pleated trousers and blouses without starch that she normally wore. Yet, along with her familiar clothes, she also left behind some of her stillness, so that the priest came to know her as excitable and rather strained, her ease lost to her in those formal and ill-fitting clothes.

Deeply committed to his vows, Noah Creed made sure to remind her of the church whenever he became uncomfortable with her devotion. Still, he was not willing to do without that devotion—as long as he could hold it in check with references to his priesthood.

As Greta prepared for those overnight trips, she’d ask her stepmother’s opinion on which clothes to take, evoking for Helene the faceless priest of her fantasies. It amused Helene, made her wonder if by imagining a priest for herself decades ago, she had somehow manifested Noah Creed for her stepdaughter. Ironic. At least Greta knew her priest’s features.
“Priests can be great lovers,”
she imagined herself telling Greta.
“Mine was often faceless”

Instead she limited herself to advice on which colors looked best on Greta. And when her husband got intrigued by his idea that his daughter was trying to snatch a priest from God, Helene made him promise not to tease Greta. He liked to say Greta should snatch at least two priests to even out what God had robbed him of. “Greta’s visiting her priest,” he’d hum when he’d step from the elevator to find the lobby empty—
no one waiting today to be healed, hallelujah
—and when Greta returned on the train, he’d be there for her at the station, searching beyond her embrace for the black-clad figure of a priest emerging from the train; but she would always be by herself, quieter than usual, and as soon as she’d settle in his car, she’d slip off her tight shoes.

She bought transparent gel to fortify her delicate fingernails.

A backpack and suitcase for Tobias when he left for Connecticut a month before his freshman year at Yale started.

Six chocolate bars for Robert that he ate without stopping though he loathed that part of himself he thought of as Fatboy and would have liked to obliterate. Fatboy had been born fully grown one morning during gym. While playing volleyball, Robert had felt Fatboy inside himself,
settling to stay, reminding him: One more hour till lunch
. Robert hated gym, hated the way his legs jiggled
when he ran, the way his stomach bounced. On Dr. Miles’ scale he weighed 187 pounds. The most ever. Al and Matthew on the other side of the net, skinny-fast, whispered something. Laughed. Robert knew they were making fun of him. He was hungry.
A
Bratwurst
sandwich today, Fatboy reminds him. And a pear. Tomorrow will be better: pork cutlets from tonight’s dinner, plum cake for dessert
. The ball came toward him, and he rushed forward, bounced it off the inside of his wrists. “Good shot,” somebody shouted. And it was a good shot. But everyone was staring. Some were laughing. At him. His wrist stung. The elastic of his shorts cut into his waist. His thighs were chafed where they rubbed together.

Greta bought smaller tablecloths for her stepmother now that she’d taken the leaves out of her mahogany table.

Cosmetics and magazines and gloves for Pearl who always had a list for her. But after the crash in the fall of 1929, the Blooms had a lot less money and many more arguments. Nate even brought up the old argument that she wasted soap.

“How could those slivers of dried-up soap have helped you?” Pearl challenged him.

“It’s the principle of saving.”

“You haven’t saved on anything else for as long as I’ve known you.”

“It’s different now.”

And it was. For the Blooms as well as for others in the building, the town, the country who’d bought stocks on margin during the Hoover bull market, often for less than five percent down, borrowing the rest from their brokers. While Nate still had Liberty Bonds and land and gold, the Clarkes lost everything and moved out of the
Wasserburg
. Already business at Stefan’s restaurant was declining, and he had to let go of one cook and two of his waiters.